Why people go crazy at the Candidates tournament
It was a smile from a member of the audience which hoodwinked Hikaru Nakamura into making an embarrassing blunder. The year was 2016, and in the second round of the Candidates, Nakamura, the great American hope, was facing off against the Russian Sergey Karjakin. In the middlegame, Nakamura, trying to give his eyes a rest from staring at the board, cast his glance into the audience, where his eyes fell on the then FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and an aide. Both held smiles on their faces. It got Nakamura thinking. “This sounds fairly embarrassing to say, but when I saw that they were smiling, for whatever reason, it made me miscalculate. I had seen a tactical idea on the board and when I saw them smiling, somehow I put two and two together. I thought that because they were smiling, there was some sort of trick in the position. It sounds really ridiculous as a professional chess player to let something like that get into your mind. I blundered, made a very basic miscalculation in …
