New In Chess Classic 2021: Carlsen Wins
And about time, too - it has been quite a while since he won an event. This is slightly bad news for Ian Nepomniachtchi, who will contest a world championship match with Magnus Carlsen late this year.
Carlsen's rival, as was almost always to be expected a few years ago in blitz events in particular, was Hikaru Nakamura. It was a well-contested match, but the champ came out on top, winning the first day's mini-match 3-1 (two draws, then two wins) and drawing the second day's match to clinch overall victory. The second day's match started well for Nakamura, who won the first game and drew the second, but Carlsen won with Black in the third game and gave Nakamura a draw in a dead won position in the fourth game. (To be fair to Nakamura, he was in a dead lost position because he had to take absurd risks to scrape up even the most meager of winning chances.) Congrats to the champ!
Congratulations also to Nakamura for an otherwise successful tournament, and to Shakriyar Mamedyarov, won a truly weird match against Levon Aronian to take third place. On day 1, all four games finished in wins for Black--mostly brutal and short wins at that. On day 2, Mamedyarov won games 1 and 3 - again with Black! - while Aronian "failed" to win his one black game, game 2, only managing a draw. By heroically managing the one draw with White out of seven games over the two days, "Shakh" pulled out overall match victory.
More on the event here, or at the official site. I'm not sure what the next major online rapid or blitz event is going to be, but the Grand Chess Tour for 2021 will kick off with a classical event in Bucharest from June 3-15, featuring most of the Candidates (Caruana, Ding, Nepo, MVL, Grischuk, and Giri), plus Aronian, Mamedyarov, So, and Radjabov.