Magnus in action in the Bundesliga

Magnus Carlsen is playing classical chess! In the German Bundesliga, which is a premier team chess league, he is debuting for the St. Pauli team this weekend in Hamburg. He won his first game on Saturday, with Black against Max Warmerdam, and now faces top ten player Wei Yi with White in the team’s second match.

Outside of a maximum-stakes World Championship, we get a much wider variety of openings. The game is a fairly standard-looking Sicilian, still in a position played dozen of times at the 11th move.

Amusingly, on the 7th board of FC St. Pauli vs. Düsseldorfer SK, there is a matchup between two of Magnus’s long-time associates, Peter Heine Nielsen and Jan Gustafsson. It may be fun to see what their motivations are, having worked so closely for so many years. There are plenty more of the world’s top players participating too, including Anish Giri, Alireza Firouzja, and Vincent Keymer. You can follow the games live on Lichess.