On Wednesday, just a few hours after playing out a quick draw with R Praggnanandhaa in the second classical game of the Chess World Cup final, Magnus Carlsen turned up online to take part in the Speed Chess Championship qualifiers.
The reason: he wanted to see if his brain was working. He racked up a score of 7.5 points in 8 games before logging off. He had been laid low by food poisoning and he also wanted to warm-up for the Rapid games in the tiebreaker.
"First of all, apologies to the players I beat and took away their chances," said Carlsen. "I really just wanted to play to warm-up. Rapid chess is a mix between classical and blitz, so getting some blitz warm-up would be good and I also wanted to see if my brain actually works. Even though I had a good score, the games weren't so good."
He added: "There were several reasons why I quit when I did. First of all, I could see that my level wasn't so good... it was okay, I had gotten the answers I wanted and I didn't want to exhaust myself and I knew that as soon as I started to lose, I would start to get pissed. So, I thought let's leave it at that."
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