Norway Chess 2025: A Tournament of Small Errors

In Round 8 of Norway Chess 2025, D Gukesh’s winning streak came to an abrupt halt as he lost to Hikaru Nakamura. In just the last three rounds, Gukesh—19 years old, reigning world champion, once dismissed as a slow positionalist—has beaten Magnus Carlsen in classical play, outlasted Arjun Erigaisi in their first decisive classical encounter, before finally falling to Nakamura, the grandmaster who streams like a pop star and calculates with monastic discipline. Wei Yi, meanwhile, has defeated Carlsen too, seizing on a familiar theme: the former world champion building a winning position, only to watch it evaporate in the endgame. As the tournament enters its final phase, the leaderboard reflects something more than form. It reflects an inversion. The old order is being replaced, endgame by endgame.

Let’s begin with what now feels like a hinge in the tournament’s narrative: Carlsen vs Gukesh, Round 6. Carlsen had Black and, for most of the game, a slight but persistent advantage. He had neutralised White’s early pressure, fixed targets on the queenside, and appeared to be dictating the game’s long arc in that distinctively Carlsenian way—slowly, positionally, without visible risk. Gukesh was low on time. His rook was passive. His king seemed uneasy. And then, on move 52, Carlsen played a check that let Gukesh centralise his king rather than force it backward. The pressure reversed. A few moves later, it was over. Carlsen had lost. Not to tactics or opening prep, but to his own style repurposed against him. He punched the table and walked off, shaken. “On a normal day, I win that game,” he would say later, visibly shattered.

Carlsen didn’t play badly. He simply couldn’t close. And Gukesh didn’t win with his brilliance. He won with presence. The game stayed alive long enough for the tension to flip—and he was there to take action when it did. The very next day, Gukesh faced Arjun Erigaisi. A matchup that had, until now, favoured Arjun both statistically and psychologically. In contrast to Gukesh’s methodical construction, Arjun plays with the lightness of someone who knows the engine is on his side. Out of the opening, Arjun again looked superior. Gukesh’s pieces were slightly awkward. The bishop was biting granite. The clock was already unkind. But something had changed. Gukesh didn’t reach for safety. He didn’t simplify. He played on, nursing imbalance. And then, again—somewhere around move 35—Arjun hesitated. Not a blunder. A small pause in control. Gukesh seized the file. Then he activated the knight. The queens came off. A rook endgame appeared, marginally better for White. And once again, Gukesh did what Carlsen used to do better than anyone: he converted pressure into inevitability.

That win—his first classical victory over Arjun—did more than improve his standing. It confirmed that the Carlsen game wasn’t an anomaly. Gukesh wasn’t just competing with the world’s best. He was outperforming them in their own territory: the long, excruciating endgame.

Then came Carlsen vs Wei Yi. Carlsen built up pressure, but as the game progressed, he made a critical error. Wei defended accurately and capitalised on Carlsen’s mistake, ultimately winning the game. At this point, the pattern was undeniable. The man who once thrived on exactness in chaos—who won because he didn’t break when others did—was now breaking. And the next generation was doing what he used to do best: holding firm, defending accurately, and waiting for the mistake.

When Round 8 of Norway Chess 2025 rolled in—bringing with it the much-anticipated faceoff between reigning World Champion Gukesh and Hikaru Nakamura, who by his own admission, has been playing “boring chess” of late—it already felt like something larger than a tournament leaderboard was on the line. Gukesh had dethroned Carlsen and Erigaisi in consecutive games. Nakamura, meanwhile, had cruised through the middle rounds. The Gukesh-Nakamura encounter opened with the Scotch. Gukesh, playing Black, entered calmly. But by move 20, he had made what would prove a soft misstep. Nakamura didn’t leap on his mistakes immediately. He circled. He bided. And then he pressed. Gukesh, for all his resourcefulness, couldn’t wriggle free. It was over in 40 moves. A clear defeat on the board.

The win brought Nakamura to 11.5 points, level with Gukesh, both trailing Fabiano Caruana’s 12.5. For Gukesh, the result stung not because of the loss itself—he had built more than enough equity over the week—but because of how human it made him look, and how untimely. With Wei Yi and Alireza Firouzja still to come, the road to Norway Chess glory had suddenly sprouted fault lines.

But even in defeat, Gukesh remains the story. His rise hasn’t been about opening wizardry or brilliancies turned into Twitter GIFs. It’s about attrition. He has been winning the kind of games that don’t look like wins until they are over. Against Carlsen, he absorbed pressure until the knight check came and the tide turned. Against Arjun, he nursed marginal edges until the position tipped and the endgame played itself.

And yet, there is Wei Yi. The Chinese GM whose win over Carlsen in Round 7 may yet prove the most significant of the tournament. It showed that Carlsen can still be Carlsen for 49 moves, and still lose. Wei endured. He didn’t overreach. And when Carlsen erred, Wei pounced with inevitability.

That’s been the story of Norway Chess 2025 so far. It’s not a story of novelties or explosions. It’s a study in strain. Games are being lost not in tactics but in terrain—positional slow-drips, incremental pressure, endgames that require four hours of exactitude and one second of faith. The gap between “equal” and “winning” is thinning. The former champions aren’t being out-prepared. They are being outlasted.

As Round 9 unfolds, the air in Stavanger is electric with consequence. Carlsen faces Caruana in a duel freighted with history, style, and standing. Gukesh, still marked by the precision-strike from Nakamura, meets Wei Yi, the most silent threat of the tournament. Arjun, the most structurally sound of the Indian prodigies, must now weather Hikaru. The old ways of winning—fast prep, big blows—are faltering. What is rising in their place is something colder, subtler, more beautiful: the long game, played by young men who have learned to punch on the break.

D GukeshHikaru NakamuraMagnus CarlsenNews BriefNorway Chess 2025Web Exclusive