Artemiev Beats Nakamura in the Final Round of Titled Tuesday

Hikaru Nakamura came to Titled Tuesday on October 6 as the first player to reach 3500 in Chess.com blitz, and he left it with a record of 3503 but without the trophy. GM Vladislav Artemiev beat him in the final round and took the title. Nakamura was streaming live from Sithonia, Greece, with spectators watching in person.

A rating he doesn’t expect to keep

Nakamura had touched exactly 3500 the day before. He told Chess.com’s Tarjei Svensen that holding it would be nearly impossible: “Unless I’m only going to skip [Titled Tuesday and 3 0 Thursday] every week, there’s no way even to keep my rating where it is.”

He called the milestone “very much a one-time thing,” which is why he said he made a point of going for it the day before. The 3503 he reached during the event is therefore a peak, and by his own account not a new baseline. For background on what these numbers do and don’t measure, see our explainer on what a chess rating actually measures.

How the field thinned out

Nakamura’s stated goal was the usual one: win. With people watching live, he said, he wanted to be competitive and not lose a bunch of games early. He managed that, opening with two games he described as smooth.

A draw in round four kept him off the list of perfect scores at the first break. Seventeen players made 4/4, among them Artemiev, last week’s winner GM Wesley So, and GMs Sina Movahed, Alexey Sarana, Awonder Liang and Liem Le.

Round five did the first real damage. Movahed beat Artemiev and Liang beat So, so two of the pre-event favorites picked up a loss immediately after the break. By the end of round six only Le, Sarana and FM Dincer Tasdogen were still perfect.

One round later the perfect list was down to a single name. Nakamura helped get it there by beating Sarana out of a theoretically drawn opening, one Sarana either didn’t know or remember, or chose not to pursue.

The deciding game

Artemiev recovered from his round-five loss and was in position to face Nakamura in the last round. He won that game to finish on 9.5/11, ahead of GMs Alexander Grischuk and Alexey Sarana on tiebreak. It was his first Titled Tuesday win since 2021. Nakamura, the player the broadcast was built around, finished ninth.

A loss in the last round is a costly way for Nakamura to finish after he had worked himself back into contention.

Nakamura’s record now stands at 3503. The next test of his view that it can’t be maintained comes on Thursday, when 3 0 Thursday offers another chance to protect it or give some back.