Chess: Hikaru Nakamura traps a queen and wins $60,000 in St Louis

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.

That night Nakamura described himself as “very, very upset” and “I didn’t do a recap. I didn’t look at chess. I went out and had some beers, played some pool, and just forgot about everything. It seemed to work out.”

Next day, the third final began with three draws, for most of which So was pressing, but by the fourth game, with the prospect of three-minute blitz looming, he was “tired from playing day in, day out, and I was pushing. I didn’t want to keep playing shorter time controls, So I thought I win or I lose, so I just took the d2 pawn.”

Two moves later, So’s black queen was trapped, with White’s final move being a backward knight retreat, which along with diagonal queen retreats are known to be among the hardest to visualise. The fatal pawn grab was at d2, but the queen was trapped on the classic b2 square, the scene for the Poisoned Pawn Sicilian made famous by Bobby Fischer