Hikaru Nakamura on Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Las Vegas 2025: I’ve more or less played a perfect tournament

USA’s Hikaru Nakamura believes he has ‘played more or less perfectly’ at the Freestyle Chess Las Vegas Grand Slam.

Nakamura topped the group stage, claiming six points in the Black Group. But the American GM suffered a 2.5-1.5 defeat to Armenia’s Levon Aronian in the upper-bracket quarterfinal, to drop out of title contention.

“When I look at the tournament thus far, I felt like I was the one player who was perhaps unlucky from the standpoint that with the exception of a couple of very critical moments against Levon I’ve more or less played a perfect tournament,” said Nakamura.

In the lower bracket, on Saturday, Nakamura beat his compatriots Wesley So and Fabiano Caruana to earn a shot at finishing third. “Today I got bad positions in every game except the last one, and I was definitely lucky,” said the 37-year-old.

On the final day, Nakamura will take on long-time rival Magnus Carlsen in the third-place playoff, with a prize money of $100,000 at stake.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW – Freestyle Chess Grand Slam, Las Vegas 2025

Carlsen, on Saturday, had offered his analysis to Nakamura ahead of the game against Caruana.

Nakamura though confessed that he made an error in the the positioning of his pieces, resulting in Carlsen’s inputs going to waste.

“Magnus for the first time in three days suddenly comes over and wants to analyze and it happens to be the one time that I think I have the position correct initially, and then I made some moves, and then I had the queen and the knight on the wrong squares by the time he came. Of course the prep didn’t work out,” said Nakamura.