Magnus Carlsen Survives a Lost Position Delivers a Brutal Checkmate

Boo, you suck. This is what he does, isn't it? Let's try and play as I played against Maxim and Into World Blitz With an early b5 not kicking the Queen away. I know that he plays this line the early Early Queen foray. I think in that line he, Maxim a little early, but Knight, Knight b... Knight f3, which is not necessarily where you want the Knight. Here he has a little bit more Flexibility. It looks a bit sus, maybe he can go for a quick knight d5 or something. Eh, maybe not. I'll take d6. It's the big deal. No? Well, he goes for it. N97 blocking the check, but My development is obviously quite poor. I'm developmentally challenged, as they say these days. What happened there? My mouse froze for a sec. It's probably a skill issue. Knight h4. Gotta go quick. King d8, yeah? I think so. Escaping the pin, preventing knight f5, and I am a piece up though, so even though that is about the only positive thing you can say about my position, that may still be fairly significant. And knight d7 next is going to solve a lot of problems. Now, if I were a good commentator, I would have prepared my next sentence, like why is Why is knight d7 an important move? And so on, but I haven't, because I cannot, I can play just much better than I explained, sadly. f6, he wants to take, take, take. Rook here, knight f5, knight d7. That doesn't really work for him, does it? That was not the conclusion I expected to reach while starting that sentence, but here we are. Yeah, I mean, that is an admission of failure if I were someone. Now I develop, this is threatened. There's always going to be some practical counterplay. My king is weak, but I don't think he really has much here. This is often a good move to get in in the Sicilian, because you sometimes have to make a little bit of an awkward move to prevent the crude threat of checkmate. And if you're wondering if I'm saying crude a bit too much because I just learned that word, no, I didn't. It's a good word, isn't it? Let's take this. How bad can that be? Bishop g2, and then I think probably just knight b6, to be honest, or queen c5. No, no, no, not queen c5. I'm crazy. Bishop a5, yeah, but I am consolidating here. King c7, king d8. And we're slowly but surely getting to safety. Knight d6 was possible there, but bishop d6 here. If he had time to go rook e7, he might have some counterplay, but his rook was hanging. So now I've successfully extricated the king, and I am a fairly clean piece up. Let's threaten mate again. Well, not really mate, but at least an unpleasant check. That's a good move. Prepares knight d4. That was somewhat missed by me. Let's change plan. Bishop c5, that's a little bit risky, isn't it? The pieces are somewhat awkwardly placed. I've got to admit that. I think we've got to try and trade a little bit. Knight f5, didn't really expect that. I thought he would go f4 immediately. If I take queen d4, knight f3, I mean there's b6 hanging at the end of it, so that wasn't really clear at all. Whereas now, well, he gets g7, but I've consolidated my position and I do have some trumps of my own. Much like the United States. Queen c5, playing this, and exactly here I want to d4 and attack with d3. We are dangerously nearing resigns territory. He takes, I take, and there's a discovered check, right. d4, and now I get a very dangerous last pawn, and attack as well. I think this wins. Knight b4. Seems incredibly unnecessary. Unless you're in a certain kind of mood, then you always take the easy option in such situations. You want to win the game with absolute 100% certainty, not 99.9. Here it takes rook d1, rook g1, there's queen c1, checkmate, just to show that. Boom!