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The lede plus a bit more:
Pawn pushers at a couple of low-stakes chess tournaments in Iowa and Louisiana recently sat down at their boards only to discover a surprising competitor: one of the highest rated chess players ever to live.
Hikaru Nakamura, the No. 2 player in the world and five-time U.S. champion, had flown in as a last-minute entrant, making him far and away the top player in the building. Not only was he rated several hundred points higher than anyone else in the fields, he was also exponentially more famous, as the planet’s leading chess influencer.
It was the chess equivalent of Aaron Judge showing up to play Little League.
Nakamura wasn’t there to tee off on inferior opponents—or for a few thousand bucks in prize money. He was exploiting an arcane loophole on a much larger mission to become the next chess world champion. But Nakamura’s maneuver hasn’t gone unnoticed. In the process, his tactics have sparked a rule change from FIDE, instant backlash to the change, and sent the chess world into a full-blown freakout.
It began with Nakamura needing to qualify for the most prestigious tournament in chess, known as the Candidates, where eight players compete for the right to challenge the defending world champion. The Candidates reserves one spot for the player with the highest rating, which would be Nakamura because world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen has withdrawn from contention.
Only FIDE, the game’s international governing body, requires that players have at least 40 classical games under their belts before the cycle is up. The problem is that Nakamura, who spends most of his time streaming to millions of followers and favors shorter formats in competition, keeps a light tournament schedule. As of June 1, he had played only 18 classical games this year.
That left him scrambling to rack up games anywhere he could—with little risk of letting his rating drop. Even he dubbed the exercise a “Mickey Mouse” tour.
At the Louisiana State Championship and the Iowa Open Championship, he played a combined 11 games, winning all of them. And his opponents were simply in awe. They found themselves in the rare position of meeting a genuine chess celebrity, while also being manhandled by him on the board.
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