The Stunning Victory—and Fist Slam—That's Rocking the Chess World, Explained
Back in February, the all-time chess great Magnus Carlsen appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to talk about his love of the game—as well as the high-pitched moments of chess-world drama, like his infamous beef with American grandmaster Hans Moke Niemann, that have come to be associated with the 34-year-old grandmaster. “Every time I lose games, it's a little bit of a story in the chess world, so I prefer to have it happen as rarely as possible,” Carlsen told Rogan, noting that this tendency was especially pronounced “if I'm playing somebody who is a little bit of a rival.”
Little did he know how prescient those words would be just months later. On Sunday, the globally top-ranked Carlsen meets face-to-face with current world champion Gukesh Dommaraju for Round 6 of Norway Chess , the closed-access summertime tournament hosted annually in Carlsen's home country. For a while, the over-the-board game's outcome seemed assured: Carlsen was dominating his 19-year-old opponent, making no blunders while forcing Dommaraju into a defensive position. But later, with just seconds left on their timers, the Indian grandmaster seized on a mistake from Carlsen's end—and completely turned the game around, leaving his challenger flustered and struggling to counteract. Then, the stunning outcome: Carlsen announcing his resignation by slamming the table in frustration, with Dommaraju standing up and walking around the room in disbelief as a shocked Carlsen walked out.
NBC News referred to that moment as “ the fist slam heard 'round the chess world ”—a fair if clichéd label for this incident, which ended up defining this unprecedented outcome. Yet this was not some full-blown tantrum from the world's greatest chess player: After the table slam, Carlsen immediately mouthed “Sorry,” shook hands with Dommaraju, exclaimed “Oh my God!” as both players stood up from the table, then apologized once again as he restored the pieces to the board. He even paused to give Dommaraju a congratulatory pat on the back before storming out of the premises.
Nevertheless, the incident has fueled days of theatrical discourse, breaking out of the typically niche proceedings of international chess tourneys to a broader reckoning over Carlsen's conduct, his status within the game, Dommaraju's come-up, and—unfortunately but naturally—the racist sentiments of many online chess observers. For those aware of Carlsen only from the cheating allegations he yelled against Niemann back in 2022 (the subject of an upcoming Netflix documentary ) or who may be generally unfamiliar with the deep chess-world background that informed Carlsen's and Dommaraju's play, it might be tough to understand how just one match in a still-ongoing tournament has inspired all this furor. (Dommaraju has since gone on to beat fellow Indian grandmaster Arjun Erigaisi in Round 7; Carlsen's match against Hikaru Nakamura initially ended in a draw before the Norwegian secured victory in an Armageddon follow-up. Round 8 took place Tuesday , with Dommaraju against Nakamura and Carlsen versus China's Wei Yi.) Allow me to offer some instruction on these moves.
Magnus Carlsen has been the world's greatest chess player for well over a decade at this point; he has been ranked No. 1 by the World Chess Federation since 2011, and he took the World Chess Champion crown from India's legendary Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand in 2013, at the age of 22. Carlsen's awe-inspiring run over the subsequent years merely clarified his status as one of the best players the chess world has ever seen, possibly up there with Russian titan Garry Kasparov . As such, the long-dominant Norwegian understandably has suggested that he has little left to prove. In 2022 Carlsen announced he'd no longer defend his World Champion title and that, while he would not stop competing anytime soon, he would be more focused on squaring off against the up-and-coming generation of young players who've been trained within a digitally dominated, algorithmically guided chess universe that differs starkly from the styles of Carlsen's once preferred classical chess format. As he told me in a 2022 interview :
You got [Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa] at 17, Gukesh D at 16 who's unbelievably strong—they're really a great generation of players born in the early to mid-2000s who are going to be conquering the top of the chess world soon. For now, it's exciting to see them rise, and I hope in a couple years I can compete with them all in the strongest tournaments. …As long as I can still compete, I can still show that I'm better than the younger generation. That's an exciting prospect for me, so I don't see myself stopping being ambitious in that sense anytime soon. But I certainly now start to feel that stuff isn't going to last forever.
Yep, “Gukesh D” is indeed referring to Dommaraju, who has a fascinating history with Carlsen. By the time of my interview with Carlsen, the Chennai-born Dommaraju had already become an international star and the pride of his native India, breaking historic records and advancing up the global player rankings from a startlingly young age. In October 2022 (just a month after the Carlsen-Niemann conflict broke big), Dommaraju battled Carlsen in the online-exclusive Aimchess Rapid tournament and became the youngest-ever player to beat Carlsen . Although that was a significant marker on its own, the Aimchess matchup ultimately wasn't the most meaningful bout. “Beating Magnus is always special but I was not really very proud of that game,” Dommaraju declared afterward, while Carlsen noted that he had “generally beaten” the teenager and hinted that he'd go for an over-the-board game sooner than later, telling the press, “I think Gukesh has been extremely impressive in classical chess recently.”
What's long been apparent is this duo's respective desire to definitively prove one's prowess over the other. In December, Dommaraju took the world chess champion crown from China's Ding Liren , who had been the first to earn that title after Carlsen's withdrawal from contention. After the showdown, Dommaraju—who became the youngest player ever to win the World Chess Championship—told journalists that his pride in that moment stemmed back to an event that had driven him since the age of 7 : Carlsen's 2013 world champion coronation over Vishy Anand. “When Magnus won I thought, I really wanted to be the one to bring back the title to India ,” Dommaraju said. “This dream that I had for more than 10 years has been the single most important thing in my life so far. Doing this for myself, my country—there is probably nothing better than this.”
That statement, a clear challenge to Carlsen, fueled an intense debate among certain chess observers. Polish grandmaster Grzegorz Gajewski, who has been assisting and training Indian players like Dommaraju for the past few years, recently told the Indian Express that his mentee “keeps facing these comments that, 'ok, you're the world champion only because Magnus didn't play, etc.' ” Carlsen had himself professed to be “ generally not impressed ” with the Ding-Dommaraju series, disparaging it as a showcase of unsophisticated chessplay. (Russian legend Vladimir Kramnik was even more stinging, tweeting that this championship marked the “ end of chess as we know it .”) Dommaraju claimed he wasn't offended by the comments and admitted that his games with Ding hadn't reached the usual standards of play seen at the world championship. And, just months before that game, Carlsen had said in an interview with the chess-centered Take Take Take app that Dommaraju had “done incredibly well in classical chess, including giving one of the all-time best performances at the Olympiad” and deemed the Indian master “ a worthy world champion .”
So, by all accounts, there remained a sort of respect between the two. But for Carlsen, keeping Dommaraju in check almost seemed to be a point of pride. In Round 1 of Norway Chess 2025, which kicked off May 26, Carlsen decisively beat Dommaraju in their first classical matchup of the year, a victory that he claimed to not have expected. Still, right afterward, he tweeted a graphic featuring “ a great quote from The Wire ”—naturally and most pointedly, it was Omar Little’s “ You come to the king, you best not miss .” Shot fired and received. (For those not in the loop: Carlsen likes tweeting such barely coded quotes. The Niemann scandal escalated after he shared a much-memed clip of onetime Chelsea football manager José Mourinho saying, at a press conference, “If I speak, I'm in big trouble, in big trouble, and I don't want to be in big trouble.”)
Then came Sunday and the time-freezing loss, which held even more significance as Carlsen's first classical chess game since last year's Chess Olympiad—and the first classical game he'd ever lost to Dommaraju. It wasn't the first time Carlsen had slammed the table with such feeling; in December, at the World Blitz Chess Championship in New York, he slammed his king down in triumph after knocking his enemy Niemann out of the tournament. This week, despite the good-sported gestures that accompanied Carlsen's physical frustration, the table-punch video generated outsize global discourse : ChessBase India asked whether the slam was “ actually rude ,” various players and commentators claimed that they wouldn't have done such a thing , and chess fans across YouTube and TikTok mocked up videos poking fun at the incident. TikTok commentators also perceived the eruption as a proxy culture war; Indians beheld the victory as representative of their nation's powerful standing , while some Carlsen defenders made racist comments against Dommaraju and Indians in general (eg, “curry smell,” “Indian scammer”). Norway Chess addressed this bigotry in a Tuesday statement : “We've seen the incredible reach of Gukesh's historic win over Magnus, and we're proud to celebrate moments like these that bring the global chess community together. However, we're also aware that among the thousands of comments across platforms, some hateful and racist remarks have appeared. We want to be clear: we do not tolerate racism or hate speech in any form.”
All that being said, it's not surprising that Carlsen would be so flustered here: He had extremely praised and criticized Dommaraju's playing in the lead-up to Norway Chess, he's sensitive about his once unquestioned superiority in the chess world, he takes these tournament games seriously, and he's still driven to prove himself against the new chess generation. The fallout from the Niemann saga, in which Carlsen's still-unproven cheating allegations dogged his unsympathetic opponent for years, still colors all his current behavior. Dommaraju, for his part, has taken the slam in stride, stating at a press conference, “ I've also banged a lot of tables in my career !” Vishnu Prasanna, an Indian grandmaster and former coach to Dommaraju, also told Indian media, “That has happened a few times before. … It was just a lot of passion there.” In other words: This isn't “ the Slap ,” folks.
Carlsen has yet to further comment on the slam, but Norway Chess will press on until Friday's Round 10, closing after the fact. Though no more table slams have been recorded, the ongoing developments have retained the drama: Carlsen's match against rival Wei Yi proved yet another tight match that also ended in blunder and loss for the world's greatest, and the boisterous Hikaru Nakamura subjected Dommaraju to a sure defeat .
Once we get the rankings and scores from the final results, you can expect a lot more chatter: on whether Carlsen is finally slipping a little as a player (perhaps, but he's still No. 1, among the very best of the very best), whether Dommaraju has what it takes to milk his recent victories (maybe, though it's still too soon to see), and whether we're at the vanguard of a generational shift in chess (news flash: It's been happening for a while now). One thing you can bet is this won't be the last you hear of the Magnus-Gukesh rivalry.
