WHY CARLSEN’S FINAL MOVE WAS BRILLIANT.Gaffney explains several other reasons why Carlsen’s last move was brilliant (a technical term; chess tournaments will award prizes for “brilliancies”).
1. At the tournament level, games are rarely resolved by checkmate. A players realizes a position is lost and resigns well before checkmate.
2. White’s move “is the kind of “mate in two†you see in practice-your-tactics books, where the reader is given a position and told to find a forced checkmate in two moves.”
3.The move has the elegance of being a queen sacrifice.
4.This was speed chess.