New Year, Same Dominance As Carlsen Wins Titled Tuesday

GM Magnus Carlsen is off to a fast start in Titled Tuesday in 2026, winning the January 6 tournament with a 9.5/11 score. He came out ahead of second-place GM Vincent Keymer and third-place GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda on tiebreaks. Duda, Keymer, and Carlsen have now won the last three Titled Tuesdays, with Duda finishing in the top-three in all of them. They have three of the top four spots in the current standings of the Titled Tuesday Winter Split (with GM Sam Sevian).

Broadcast

GM David Howell and WFM Maud Rodsmoen captained today’s Take Take Take broadcast. If you missed it, catch it below!

Carlsen and IM Faustino Oro (who scored 7.5 points, finishing 40th) were streaming at TTT studio. Despite being only 12 years old, Oro is not just a chess pro but also a chess interview pro. Asked after the tournament whether he feels pressure to set the grandmaster age record, he said, “I don’t feel pressure, I only try to play my best chess.” Carlsen then joined the set; “He’s on an incredible path,” he said about Oro.

CCT Standings

Duda jumped into second and Keymer into fourth in the current Titled Tuesday split as Carlsen extended his lead. It’s all part of the Champions Chess Tour (CCT). The updated top 10 are as follows:

Tournament Recap

The holidays pretty much over with a new year well underway (we’re already almost 2% of the way to 2027!) participation was 440 players, the most since September 23, and all the stars were there. Carlsen and Nakamura were among 19 players to play perfectly before the first break, including high-profile fourth-round matchups against GMs Ian Nepomniachtchi and Eric Hansen, respectively.

Only seven of the 19 held onto a 100% score through the fifth round. Nakamura was one of the players to drop after GM Levon Aronian bested him. Aronian only had 3.9 seconds left when Nakamura resigned, but it would have been plenty of time to checkmate.

In the sixth round, trying to remain perfect were GM Pranav Venkatesh and Carlsen, Sevian and Aronian in a battle of Armenian-Americans, GM Vasif Durarbayli against GM Nikolas Theodorou, and GM Cristobal Henriquez, playing a GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave on just 4.5 points.

Aronian and Vachier-Lagrave won first, leaving two wild finishes after them. Carlsen, who had hung his a-pawn and was much worse for it, turned things around before Durarbayli–Theodorou dissolved into a mad time scramble. At one point, Theodorou had a perpetual check, and then a mate-in-one, but Durarbayli wriggled out of that jam. By the time Durarbayli was again getting checkmated, he also had just 0.1 seconds left… but Theodorou had 0.0.

Durarbayli’s reward was an immediate seventh-round pairing with Carlsen, who won without trouble. The third perfect player remaining, Aronian, played Vachier-Lagrave to a draw, leaving Carlsen the last player on 7/7. Aronian was a half-point back, as was GM Etienne Bacrot, after his opponent GM Sina Movahed blundered rook in time trouble and Bacrot avoided flagging against an opponent 27 years his junior.

All eyes now went to Aronian vs. Carlsen for the eighth round, in a rematch of the finals in the Grand Slam South Africa which Aronian had won. Night had now fallen on the ocean view outside Aronian’s window, and then night fell on his position as Carlsen extended his perfect start to 8/8.

Bacrot, meanwhile, had gotten matched with Nakamura and lost that game. Entering the second break, six players found themselves a point back of Carlsen: Nakamura, Pranav, Durarbayli, last week’s winner Keymer, GM Hans Niemann, and not one but two players who missed the first round: GMs Salem Saleh and Minh Le.

Coming out of the break, the expected Carlsen–Nakamura matchup manifested. Both players seemed in good spirits on their streams, Carlsen beginning: “We got Mr. Nakamura, and we’re going to hit him with 1.e4. And now he’s thinking, ‘Ah, Magnus is just gonna play for a draw if I play …e5, mah mah mah’… and he’s going for c5.” Nakamura soon decided, “I’m going to go for something that I know is dubious because I have to win the game” before breaking into a singalong of “Bad Romance.”

We got Mr. Nakamura, and we’re going to hit him with 1.e4.

– Magnus Carlsen

By the end of the game, Carlsen was no longer quite as jokey. The game turned toward Nakamura until he dropped a pawn, at which point the computer started freaking out over the next several moves. But as time trouble erupted, Nakamura gained a mass of passed pawns despite being down an exchange, and the pawns won out.

Carlsen would say after the tournament: “It was a little bit typical of our games recently—a little bit tense, [which] sometimes means the quality is not going to be perfect. Which is a bit annoying.” More annoying at the time was probably the massive tie in the standings he now faced. Keymer had beaten Durarbayli, and Niemann and Pranav had ended Saleh and Le’s attempts to go 10/10.

With two rounds left, Carlsen, Nakamura, Keymer, Pranav, Niemann all had eight points, while Aronian, Duda, GM Matthias Bluebaum, and GM Alexander Grischuk were a half-point behind. Nakamura and Niemann immediately disappointed the audience with the infamous Berlin Draw. The broadcast then moved to Carlsen’s battle against Keymer, a game which would outlast all the other main ones ongoing (Theodorou over Aronian, Duda over Pranav, and a draw between Grischuk and Bluebaum). As in the previous round, time trouble couldn’t help but decide things. It was Keymer getting the better of Carlsen until they repeated the position a third time, resulting in a sudden draw, with Keymer ending at 1.1 seconds and Carlsen at 2.9.

Of all things, it was now a fight between Carlsen and Niemann that would decide the tournament. “You couldn’t write a better script for this tournament if you tried,” Rodsmoen exclaimed. Duda had also climbed into a tie for first and would battle Nakamura, while Keymer was still in it as well and facing Theodorou.

With Carlsen-Niemann leading the broadcast, Duda gained a quick advantage per the computer with the two bishops. That game would end up the first shoe to drop, with Duda never letting go of his edge.

Carlsen also gained a big edge on both the board and clock, while Keymer was engaged in the most back-and-forth game of the three. Niemann ended up resigning…

… just as Keymer finally took a big edge and soon won.

Once all the games finished, tiebreaks resolved in Carlsen’s favor, by four points over Keymer and Duda rather far back. GM Andrew Tang managed to score nine points, as did Henriquez and Grischuk. They finished fourth through sixth, respectively, while the women’s prize went to WGM Savitha Shri B.

January 6 Titled Tuesday | Final Standings (Top 20)

(Full final standings.)