Magnus Carlsen defeats Indian Grandmaster Arjun Erigaisi on Day One of Julius Baer Generation Cup

Magnus Carlsen, the reigning Chess World Champion and the highest-ranking chess player in the game’s history, managed to defeat Indian Grandmaster Arjun Erigiasi on Day One of the two-match Julius Baer Generation Cup final. After three matches on Day One Carlsen scored 2.5 points against Erigiasi’s 0.5, thus winning the four-game first match without playing the last one.

One Day one, the 31-year-old Carlsen won the first game in 40 moves and improved upon the same by dismantling Erigiasi’s defence in the next game in 29 moves. The 19-year-old Indian did put up a fight in the third game, in which he held the world champion to a draw.

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If Erigiasi wins the four-game second match on Sunday, the winner will be decided by a blitz match. After the first match, the Indian Grandmaster said, “It’s just evident that he’s the better player but hopefully things will go my way and I’ll try to play my best chess.”

Regarding his win in the first game, Carlsen said that he wanted to “evade” the preparation of Erigiasi since the latter “as a very wide repertoire”. He further added that it was this strategy that “worked out well, in the sense that I got a strategically superior position pretty soon.”

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Erigiasi, who is currently ranked 24 among male chess players in the world, had defeated Vietnam’s Liem Quang Le in the semi-final of the ongoing tournament. In the preliminaries, Erigiasi came second to Carlsen. The world number one dominated the prelims, when he collected 34 points. 

The Julius Baer Generation Cup is seventh among the nine events of the 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, in which the total prize money sums up to US $1.6 million. The Julius Bear Cup’s prize money stands at US $150,000. The tournament started on September 18 and will end on September 25 with the final game between Carlsen and Erigiasi.