By Sulagna Halder
9 July, 2025:
The talented chess prodigy, Indian Nihal Sarin produced a brilliant performance as he managed to beat Magnus Carlsen, a five time world champion, by forfeit, in a thrilling blitz match on the “Titled Tuesday” event when it was all over the score was 10-9.
Young Kerala star Sarin, 20, beat the world No 1 in a set of blitz games staged at Chess.com, which led to congratulatory posts on his performance. There were two editions of the event, early and late, where the former began at 9:30 pm IST and the latter at 2:30 am and 740 and 486 people entered it respectively.
During the first session, Sarin started with poor suitable loss, but he recovered with a great performance, as he won nine games out of the ten games left and drew one hence getting 9.5 point as second position to Alexey Sarana, after tie break. In the meantime, Carlsen placed tenth during this leg underlining the rise of confidence and form Sarin had made.
In the late edition, Sarin won the first six rounds and collected 8.5 points to end in the seventh position. Carlsen did better here but still only ended up third with 9 points but Sarin added his tally to underscore his superiority.
The decision by Sarin to win his match against Carlson by resignation during one of the blitz games (which in effect ended the match coming at 10-9) is seen as a masterful tactical move, and a tactical brilliance plus nerve in front of the crowd. There were no actual quotes of the players but analysts observed that the performance by Sarin was the coming of age moment (latimerle, suburbannew, wholly, six)
Sarin has previous victories over other chess luminaries like Maxime Vachier Lagrave, Jan Krzysztof Duda, and Benjamin Bok earlier on, which only enhanced his reputation of being one of the youngest talents in the world of chess.
This is an indication of Sarin ever rising stature in elite chess circuity since his performance in the first and second leg of the blitz event was impressive. He did break past the 2700 Elo rating level in the past, and now expands his competitive zone to Esports World Cup later this year, playing at the international level in India colors.
This piece of history breaking of Sarin against Carlsen has created buzz among the chess lovers in India. According to the observers, it does not only presage the change of blitz chess related dynamics but also a bright future of Sarin in serious classical and rapid events. He turns out to be tested by his next step at the Esports World Cup on how to convert his online blitz triumph to an over the board triumph.
