Carlsen drops major hint on challenging Gukesh for World Championship while discussing Nakamura's 'shameless' strategy

Five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen has made it amply clear that he isn’t a fan of Hikaru Nakamura's strategy of qualifying for next year's Candidates Tournament via the ratings’ spot by competing in lower-ranked events, labeling the strategy “shameless”. At the same time, the world No 1 also dropped a major hint on his future and whether he is likely to challenge reigning world champion D Gukesh for his title next year or not.

After opting to skip the Sinquefield Cup last month, world No 2 Nakamura has registered clean sweeps at the Louisiana State Championship as well as the 70th Iowa Open – tournaments where he barely faced any challenge thanks to the massive gulf in rating between him and the rest of the field. Nakamura won all seven matches in the former that took place in New Orleans and before registering a perfect score of 5 in Iowa City.

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“I kind of admire the way he is going about it because it is so shameless. The thing is a lot of players, they probably would have picked tournaments where there was maybe like a couple of IMs or something like that,” Carlsen said on the Take Take Take app, reflecting on Nakamura’s choice of tournaments.

“But Hikaru just wants to make sure that he’s getting his games, which is the pragmatic thing to do. It’s absolutely shameless, but it’s probably the right thing to do. It looks like the system could do with some fixing. But I’m not part of that s**t anymore. So it’s fine,” the 34-year-old added, effectively confirming that he won’t be challenging Gukesh for the title that he had first taken off Indian legend Viswanathan Anand in 2013.

Why Nakamura has been competing in lower-rated tournaments

Nakamura, currently has a live rating of 2815.8, second only to Carlsen’s 2839 and ahead of American GM Caruana (2789) as well as India’s R Praggnanandhaa (2779.8) and Arjun Erigaisi (2778.8).

Caruana has already qualified for next year’s Candidates through the 2024 FIDE Circuit. Praggnanandhaa, meanwhile, currently leads the 2025 FIDE Circuit leaderboard and is expected to confirm his place through that event, if not the ongoing FIDE Grand Swiss in Samarkand where the top two players will qualify.

Erigaisi, who is also participating in the Grand Swiss tournament at the moment, thus remains the most closest challenger to Nakamura for the rating spot though the latter currently is well ahead and is a favourite to seal that spot.

The Candidates qualification period for the rating spot got underway in August and will be active till January, thus including the FIDE World Cup that takes place in Goa, India starting next month. Nakamura, however, has already indicated that he is unlikely to take part in that event.