Norway Chess reaches its endgame with Magnus Carlsen and Gukesh in the lead

By evening the chessboards will be cleared and the clocks reset to zero, but right now, in that crepuscular pause before the last round begins, the tournament hall in Stavanger holds its breath. The World Champion, D Gukesh, 18 and undefeated by the weight of expectations, is preparing to play Fabiano Caruana with the black pieces. He has, over the course of this tournament, defeated Magnus Carlsen in classical play, lost to Wei Yi in Armageddon, beaten Wei Yi in a rematch, and most recently produced a sequence of 15 consecutive top engine moves. Across the table from him, Caruana, the ever-calculating American, knows this is a boy already well on his way to becoming an institution.

Half a point ahead on the leaderboard sits Magnus Carlsen, Norway’s native son, who faces fellow Indian Arjun Erigaisi. Carlsen is playing with the black pieces too. Should he win, he secures the Norway Chess title. If he draws and wins the ensuing Armageddon tiebreak, he likely still claims it. But if he falters—if Arjun takes him to a tiebreak and wins, and Gukesh beats Caruana in regulation—then Gukesh takes the title. A tie at the top would trigger a playoff.

Carlsen, 34, has been the world’s best for the better part of 15 years. He is the player for whom adjectives like “Mozart” and “machine” were exhausted too early. He has long since given up defending his world title, explaining with practised frankness that the classical format no longer interests him. But this week, in Stavanger, something broke through the cool. Gukesh didn’t beat Carlsen with novelty or fireworks. He beat him with steadiness. With the kinds of moves that cause no anxiety to the engine but dismantle a human’s rhythm. In the post-game footage, Carlsen’s reaction was human and unguarded: a grimace, a hand clenching into the table. He was, for the first time in a long while, no longer inevitable.

He still leads the tournament, of course. His Round 9 win against Caruana—sacrificing a pawn, pressuring through the endgame—was vintage Carlsen. Coldly beautiful. As for Gukesh’s game against Wei Yi in Round 9, the Indian played the Petroff with a queen manoeuvre—Qd3 to Qc4—that knocked Wei Yi out of prep. The game turned sharp, then quiet, then sharp again. Gukesh stumbled briefly, then recalibrated and played move after brilliant move. At the end, Wei Yi resigned. Gukesh looked—as he often does—somewhere between relieved and unreadable.

Meanwhile, Hikaru Nakamura has emerged from the wings to complicate the subplot. His victory over Arjun Erigaisi in Round 9 via Armageddon tiebreak kept him in the upper half of the table. He now plays Wei Yi in the final round—a game that may not decide the title, but will certainly shape the final order of things. Wei Yi has been a wild variable this tournament. His style is elegant, but his outcomes often chaotic. The encounter with Nakamura, a player who thrives on rhythm disruption, is likely to produce sparks.

Still, it seems the centre of gravity remains somewhere between Carlsen and Gukesh. Gukesh, for his part, is no longer playing for the benefit of disbelief. He is not the prodigy who surprises you. He is the player who makes you afraid of inevitability. He is also, crucially, calm. There are no flamboyant declarations, no post-game bluster. Asked about his preparation, he smiles briefly and says things like “just looked at a few lines”.

Carlsen, by contrast, now moves through the tournament with the grace and fatalism of a great actor nearing curtain call. He wins, still, with elegance. But he speaks of chess like someone who has already begun to narrate his own exit. One senses that if he wins this tournament, he will not so much celebrate as disappear quietly into the fjords, muttering something about blitz ratings and Fischer Random.

Today, it is not just the final of a tournament. It is the hinge of an era. If Carlsen wins, we speak of legacy. If Gukesh does, we speak of power transfer. If both lose, or draw, or cancel each other out in some twist, the tension will remain unresolved but not forgotten.

At some point this evening, someone will lean across the board and offer a hand. A clock will be stopped. A sigh will escape. The table will be wiped clean, but something will have changed.

CaruanaD GukeshMagnus CarlsenNews BriefNorway Chess 2025Web Exclusive