Checkmate: Magnus Carlsen violently drops match against Gukesh Dommaraju
The game became intense when Carlsen lost a crucial piece and showed his frustration by hitting the table after the defeat
Magnus Carlsen, the top-ranked chess player in the world, lost for the first time in the classical format to the Indian player Gukesh Dommaraju, the current world champion. They faced each other at the Norway Chess 2025 tournament. However, the match between them went viral around the world for reasons not related to their ability.
After the Norwegian lost a knight, the game was led to an endgame in which each player had only a few seconds left on their clocks. Gukesh was in a winning position, and Carlsen lost the match and expressed his frustration surprisingly: he punched the table.
Gukesh's response to Carlsen's reaction
In the video, Carlsen offered a resignation handshake and then apologized to the World Champion, accompanied by an "Oh my God" exclamation. After the match, Gukesh gave an interview expressing surprise at winning the game, since at one point the match looked hopeless for him.
"There wasn't much I could do," he said. "It was just clearly lost, so I was just trying to make moves that were tricky for him, and luckily he got into a time scramble." After the match, Carlsen beat Hikaru Nakamura, the world's second-ranked player, in a sudden-death match.
Carlsen's aggressive behavior
Despite being the world number one, Carlsen has a long history of being rude to his opponents. First, he has a specific strategy of arriving late to his matches in order to lose some time on his clock and present a "disadvantage" for himself. However, Magnus ends up winning the match most of the time.
Another rude incident happened in 2022, when Carlsen lost to Hans Niemann, an American Grandmaster. The world number one withdrew from the tournament and claimed that Niemann cheated during their match. After that, in the same year, the players faced each other again in an online tournament, but the Norwegian made only one move and then left the match.
