Hikaru Nakamura, who combines streaming to over a million followers with a comeback to classical chess in his mid-30s, has won the American Cup, a $200,000 knockout including $60,000 for the winner.
The defeated finalist, Wesley So, snatched a poisoned pawn and lost his queen in a 19-move decider. The five-time US champion, 35, won through a bruising trilogy of matches at St Louis to defeat his fellow world top-10 GM.
Nakamura had hoped that the competition format, two-game mini-matches with progressively accelerating time limits, would allow him to halve his way to his three-minute blitz speciality.
Ir was a trilogy because they were playing a double elimination event where defeated players went to a losers bracket. Nakamura won their first final but So bounced back from the losers bracket and won the second final on demand last Saturday.