Norway Chess 2025

Norway Chess features multiple events, including Super-GM tournament. It is organized yearly in Stavanger(also known as "Oil Capital of Norway"). It took place from May 26 to June 6 this year

Line Up

Tournament is unique in a sense that currently it's an only classical chess tournament where Magnus Carlsen plays regularly. Other participants were Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, World Champion Gukesh, Erigaisi and Wei Yi (#1 in China, #8 in the World in June)

Women's World Champion GM Ju Wenjun, GMs Lei Tingjie, Humpy Koneru, Anna Muzychuk, Vaishali Rameshmabu and IM Sarasadat Khademalsharieh participated Norway Chess Women.

Format

Double round-robin, 6 players, 10 rounds. Tournaments had special scoring system 3 points for a win, in case of draw Armageddon is played, winner of Armageddon gets 1,5 points, loser 1 point. That's an interesting system, I believe it made games more decisive, as well as the time-control, which was 2 hours and 10 second increment from 41st move, which isn't a lot of time in comparison to other classical time-controls.

Results

Lichess implemented custom game scores in their Broadcast during that tournament so you can see table there. It was a very close race till the end.
Carlsen won Norway Chess for 7th time, scoring 16 points.
Caruana lost to Magnus in 9th Round but won Gukesh in the last round finishing on second place with 15,5.
Gukesh scored 14,5, 3rd place.
Nakamura finished 4th with 14 points, drawing Wei Yi, and losing to him in Armageddon in the last round. But overall had a good tournament, since he aims to get a rating spot in the Candidates, he increased his rating from 2804 to 2807.
Erigaisi finished with 13 points, delivering a nice checkmate in the Armageddon game against Carlsen to end the tournament.
Wei Yi had a rough tournament, -10 rating, didn't win a single classical game but won few Armageddons, for example Nakamura, and Carlsen, both, twice.

Anna Muzychuk won Women's section with 16,5 points. But it was a close tournament as well. Also Women section had a good prize fund, same in money as Open one.

Carlsen - Gukesh

Their first classical encounter was the most interesting to fans around the globe. It happened right in the first round, very close game but Carlsen navigated better in time trouble

And you probably know how their next game in round 6 ended. Magnus had close to winning position, but Gukesh defended greatly and Magnus made a crucial mistake in time trouble
Turned out that tricky knight comes just in time to stop black's pawns, Magnus slammed the table and this moment went viral

Norway Chess Games

Every year "Norway Chess Games" are organized, which is basically some interesting event on the rest day. Culinary, farming among other things. This year it was different competitions in Wild West setting.
https://youtu.be/MKx22uDANoo
You can also check post with a lot of photos on Norway Chess website

Other Highlights, Puzzles

Tournament had a lot of interesting tactical fights, endgames, I put them all into a study with puzzles to solve!

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It's one of the best tournaments of this year which I actually closely followed