Carlsen Edges Nakamura on Tiebreaks in 3+0 Thursday

They aren’t playing in the ongoing Chess Olympiad in Samarkand, but that didn’t stop GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Hikaru Nakamura from showing up for the debut edition of 3+0 Thursday on September 24, Chess.com’s new weekly bullet series. The debut split into three separate 11-round Swiss brackets.

Carlsen and Nakamura landed in the same one, tied for first on nine points along with IM Sergey Sklokin, GM Dmitry Andreikin, and FM Artin Ashraf, before Carlsen took the outright title on tiebreaks.

The mouse slip that decided a game along the way didn’t actually settle the Carlsen-Nakamura math. It came in round 10, in a different game entirely, when Carlsen faced Tuan Minh Le.

Le held a time advantage and real winning chances in an equal endgame until “c7-c6??” flipped the position outright, the kind of accidental click that can matter as much as any real blunder once a bracket compresses down to three-minute games. That result padded Carlsen’s own score in the same five-way tie, even though he and Nakamura never had to face each other to settle first place.

Nakamura’s presence at the top of the standings fits a pattern the site has tracked closely. Nakamura has built an absurd streak of Bullet Brawl wins, and a share of first in a brand-new bullet format on his very first appearance shows that dominance in fast time controls translating across formats, not just the one event where he’s made his name.

The other two brackets crowned their own outright winners. GM Parham Maghsoodloo won the second bracket with nine points, opening seven-for-seven before closing out with two draws; Haik Martirosyan and Sergei Zhigalko also reached nine points but fell short on tiebreaks. In the third bracket, FM Artin Ashraf took sole first with nine points, his second straight Thursday win.

The heartbreak in that third bracket belonged to Tuan Minh Le, the same player on the wrong end of Carlsen’s mouse-slip win one bracket over. Needing a win in the final round to force a share of first, he blundered instead and lost to Oleksandr Bortnyk, finishing second, half a point back.

Bullet events like this one are unforgiving in exactly that way: a player can do everything right for most of an event and still end up on the wrong side of the standings once the fastest games get decided by inches rather than strategy.

With the Olympiad still dominating the sport’s attention out of Samarkand, it says something that Carlsen and Nakamura chose to spend their Thursday in a brand-new bullet format instead of sitting it out. Whether 3+0 Thursday becomes a fixture on their calendars the way Bullet Brawl has for Nakamura is the open question heading into next week’s edition.