After three weeks of draws failed to produce a winner, the players settled the title in rapid chess, with Carlsen retaining his title.
After three weeks, 12 straight draws and a day of tiebreakers, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen finally retained the world chess championship in London on Wednesday with a victory against Fabiano Caruana, his American challenger.
Carlsen’s victory came in what amounted to sudden-death chess: a scheduled series of four so-called rapid games in which the players started with 25 minutes to make their moves. The speedier pace of the games, after the far more deliberate matchups of the previous three weeks, meant players were more likely to make blunders. And that increased the chance of a victory by one player.
Carlsen won the first two games, then closed out Caruana in Game 3.
In Game 1, Carlsen, playing white, quickly seized control of the center and, after a flurry of exchanges, wound up with a pawn advantage. For the first time in the match, he was able to turn the edge into a win; Caruana resigned after 55 moves.
Caruana got the white pieces for Game 2 and seized an early advantage of his own. But he seemed to press his advantage a little too hard, commentators said, and Carlsen turned the tables on him for win No. 2.
That left Caruana needing two straight wins to extend the championship to the next round of even speedier matches. But Carlsen needed only a single draw, and when he got his third win — in the face of an increasingly aggressive series of moves by Caruana — the title was his.
Caruana, 26, was bidding to become the first American champion since Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky to win the world title in 1972. The famously cantankerous Fischer forfeited his title in 1975 amid a dispute with the world chess federation, and the sport has been dominated by Russians and Eastern Europeans in the decades since then.
