well the obvious explanation is that they arent so much weaker. People are actually very very close in skill near the top. If you are a more famous player and only play against high rated opponents in invite only tourneys that can inflate your rating. I never understood the hype about carlsen personally. Sure hes good. But i dont see him being in a different league than all the other super gms.
is this true
Well, I just read that apparently the Noweigan PM made the first move today for him, so that probably explains it. (She really shouldn't have played 1..f6.)
I am seeing that Carlsen isn't the only top player that is losing games to lower rated players, there are enough active GMs such that the top players can't prepare something accurate against all of them at the same time.
Carlsen is VERY clearly out of shape in this Olympiad. Drew with a 2500 Finnish GM at the starting. Should have lost to Caruana and Dragan. What Naiditsch said was correct. He is lucky most of the time...
I think the press around him constantly videoing and taking pictures are distracting him. He's in his home country, so he's probably getting more celebrity harassment than he's used to.
when u experiment with unusual and dubious positions sometimes u get burned. 2680 players are pretty good too.
Carlsen has just been overconfident playing retarded moves in the opening. He got lucky to win using the shitty patzer scandinavian against Fabiano....
This is a wake up call to Carlsen. He has to play everyone seriously because he isn't that much better than them.
In Tromso Carlsen has the opportunity to play provocative chess, just for fun- and this is exactly what he is doing.
He has lost two games -today he lost against Saric, after playing an extremely dubious opening (to pout it mildly), but why should he care? He can get the lost rating points back easily- while in the "serious" tournaments he's participating he has no chances for provocative chess.
For him, the Olympiad is a great chance to play nonsense, and see if he can win, after all.
Could be. But I watched today, and to me he looked pretty tired. And then tonight I saw on Trent's twitter that they were out boozing hard last night.
"Battered. Blame
@MagnusCarlsen entirely, it all went downhill after those shots..."