Although he seems in top shape and, inter alia, managed to even win against world champ Vishy Anand both at the Linares and at the Amber (Blindfold) tournaments (through wonderful games)…, there is definitely something wrong with Magnus Carlsen and the final games of most recent chess tournaments he has been participating in– which is probably more frustrating to his fans than to himself, it seems, given he continues on the same frequence :-).
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January: in this year’s Corus tournament Magnus was clearly winning and then he lost unexpectedly the last game to Yue Wang, which sent him to the 5th position, rather than 1st, as I wrongly predicted (at least I am happy that I correctly forecasted Fabiano Caruana winning Corus’s Group B; I think we will hear a lot more that name in the future)…
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Feb-March: ok, this is somewhat different, but same in terms of implications: in the Linares ’09 Carlsen does not lose the last game, for a change, but loses two games in Rounds 8 and 10, to Aronian and Yue Wang respectively, both while he was playing white; he ends up only third (with both Aronian and Yue Wang behind him…).
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March: after dominating the Amber Blindfold tournament, Magnus loses dramatically the last blindfold game to Radjabov (in fact he lost the last two games here, previously to Kramnik), and thus shares the Amber Blindfold top spot with Aronian and Kramnik, while achieving only 4th position in the Amber Combined (Blindfold+Rapid)…
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May: nothing different at this year’s Mtel, in Sofia, where Carlsen usually leads with one to go, but then loses the last game to Shirov and misses again the first spot. Just great… the curse seems impossible to break.
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let us hope things will be different at Dortmund, in July (where currently 44% of the persons answering the poll on the official site predict the Viking to win…). But I keep my expectations low this time :-). Carlsen needs to break somehow the curse of the last game in order to ever become World Champion (or anywhere close enough)…
