Alireza Firouzja yesterday suffered a tough loss to Hikaru Nakamura in the 10th round of the FIDE Candidates Chess 2022. (Replay the game: Hikaru Nakamura – Alireza Firouzja 1-0, R10) But not only… He also suffered a massive loss against Daniel Naroditsky as they spent late-night hours playing a hyper-bullet match of 250 games (with the time control of 30 seconds per player)! Naroditsky won the match with a final result of 142-108.
Before the 250-game match with Naroditsky, Firouzja tried himself against other online opponents, spending more than 5h playing bullet only hours ahead of the R11 Candidates game vs Ian Nepomniachtchi. He logged off from lichess.org at 5:45 am in the morning (local Madrid time). Magnus Carlsen commented on Firouzja’s decision to prepare for the Candidates game against the sole leader by playing the bullet matches: “Now that Alireza has gone back to his bullet roots, I’m sure he’ll be inspired and win tomorrow!“.
The FIDE Candidates Chess 2022 11th round starts at 15:00 CEST, with the following pairings (follow each link for the live games): Hikaru Nakamura – Richard Rapport / Alireza Firouzja – Ian Nepomniachtchi / Teimour Radjabov – Jan-Krzysztof Duda / Fabiano Caruana – Ding Liren
More reactions on the hyper-bullet match Firouzja vs Naroditsky:
Part of the hyper-bullet match between Firouzja and Naroditsky was recorded and published on YouTube by Chess GG.
Featured photo: FIDE/Stev Bonhage
