Country for Old Men || Magnus Carlsen vs Denis Lazavik || Esports World Cup 2026

Hello everyone and welcome to an incredible game from the eSports World Cup. It just finished and it is absolutely spectacular. It is Magnus Carlsen, the winner of the previous eSports World Cup versus Dennis Lazavik.

Dennis is currently only 20 years old. He's 2800 in rapid. He's a spectacular player. If you've ever seen him play blitz, bullet, anything online, he will crush literally everyone. His classical rating still has to catch up to his online skills. He's currently 2621, which is pretty impressive. He's

climbing up to 2650, then then comes 2700, and then well, you decide whether you want to pursue that or will you remain an online player.

But you know, be that as it may, he is in the finals against the legend himself, against Magnus Carlsen, and it's not easy. I mean, it's never easy regardless of who you beat when you face Magnus in the finals. It's very few have been there and uh you know, everyone does poorly, but some do

you know, almost a decent. And I'm going to discuss the results of the match. There were two two separate matches, each consisting of four games, and we're going to check out this game, and then we're going to discuss what happened.

But yeah, it's uh it's a really really wild situation. And also, if you don't know what happened in the Hikaru versus Alireza match, Hikaru addressed it online already. So, this is what Hikaru wrote.

If you guys I'm not going to read it out for you if any of you are actually interested, but you don't have Twitter, you can pause the video and read it for yourselves uh because well, it's an important piece of information if you guys were only watching the the live show.

So, yeah, if you wanted you you have paused. that. let's check out the game. Uh Magnus with white opens with pawn to e4. And yeah, Magnus uh reaching the final seed defeated Nihal Sarin and Alireza Firouzja, whereas Dennis Lazavik defeated Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Hikaru Nakamura. So, e4, we have pawn to

c6. Uh Dennis goes for the Caro-Kann defense. We have pawn to d4, d5. And now, we don't have knight c3 or even e5.

No, Magnus goes for the exchange variation. We have captures, captures, and pawn to c4. This is the Panov attack. And um at this level, these guys, of course, know everything about it. Uh uh very uh I I would say it's impossible for either side to surprise the other guy. Knight to f6, we have knight to c3.

And now, knight to c6. Also, e6 is popular. Knight to c6, those are the two main ideas. Knight f3, we have a6. And we have a capture on d5. Captures, captures, bishop to c4. Uh and bishop to e6. Uh you can't say e6. Bishop to e6 is a bit more more common if white is hasty with the castles, then you can win the

game on the spot. Uh this will win the game as the queen is hanging and also the bishop on c4. So, Magnus plays knight to g5. Again, nothing new. This has all been played before. And uh even what comes next has been played before.