It's not exactly a first, seeing Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura face off in the finals of a tournament with a short time control, and the renewal of their rivalry gives us all something to look forward to. Nakamura beat Fabiano Caruana on Friday and Carlsen beat Ding Liren on Saturday, but both players struggled on their way to victory.
The first two games of the Nakamura-Caruana match were drawn. Caruana had a small but usable edge in game 1, while Nakamura had a serious, possibly winning advantage in game 2. Caruana collapsed in game 3, losing with White, but in game 4 he gave Nakamura a taste of his own medicine. It has been a while now, but in the '00s Nakamura won many gorgeous games on the black side of the Classical King's Indian, breaking through against the enemy king while his opponents tried to crash through on the queenside. This wasn't a Classical King's Indian, but the themes were very similar, and it was Caruana whose kingside play trumped Nakamura's queenside advantages. White had been better, but as often happens in King's Indian(-ish) race situations, the player whose king comes under fire finds it difficult to play a perfect defense.
It was on to a two-game blitz playoff (a difference between the final four and the preliminaries is that the Armageddon game only comes after (up to) two two-game blitz playoffs). Nakamura looked set to win yet another game with the black pieces, but once again Caruana scraped up counterplay, outplayed Nakamura, and had good chances to win a second straight game. Unfortunately for him, he had a blackout, sacrificing a rook to create a threat that Nakamura's last move had prevented. This meant the sacrifice was an outright blunder, and he resigned several moves later. He gave a good try in the last game, but ultimately achieved no more than a drawn ending. As that was no better than a loss, he did what he could to make "something" happen, and that turned out to be a lost queen ending. So Nakamura wound up winning by an overall score of 4-2 but the match was obviously much closer than a double-up score would suggest.
While Carlsen won in "regular time", he was much closer to being eliminated than Nakamura. The first game was a normal draw, and game two was well-played and even until Carlsen blundered into mate for the second time in the tournament (the first time was in game two of his match with Alireza Firouzja). Down a point, he came out of the opening of game three with a lousy position, despite having the white pieces, but then he got bailed out when Ding played 20...f6(?). It made sense to keep White's knight out of e5, but the resulting light-squared weaknesses were an even bigger problem. He was lost after some further inaccuracies, but a Carlsen error gave him a chance to save the game. He missed it, and this time he walked into a speedy mate.
All tied up, game 4 was an epic battle, a completely crazy game with both players fighting for the win. Everything was unclear and both sides had serious winning chances at different points in the game. Even very close to the end there were several moments where Ding could have had a winning or near-winning advantage, but in the end he made the last error(s) and lost.
All the games, with my comments, are here. Let's hope for a great final today (Sunday), and hope that another elite event will happen soon. (Hopefully with much better play. My suspicion is that the players weren't used to playing such "slow" online games. Bullet? Oh, yes. Three-minute? Sure, and even five-minute is not out of their online comfort zone. But 15-minute chess is practically correspondence chess by online standards, and takes getting used to - especially since it's an unusual time control for these players, period - they don't use this time control in "real" (=OTB) events either, except on occasion in the tiebreak rounds of the World Cup.