Here's why Hikaru Nakamura, the world's No. 2 chess player, is gaming the system with 'Mickey Mouse' tournaments Jack BaerSeptember 12, 2025 at 4:44 AM 0 Hikaru Nakamura is taking an odd road to the Candidates Tournament.
- - Here's why Hikaru Nakamura, the world's No. 2 chess player, is gaming the system with 'Mickey Mouse' tournaments
Jack BaerSeptember 12, 2025 at 4:44 AM
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Hikaru Nakamura is taking an odd road to the Candidates Tournament. (Photo by Sankhadeep Banerjee/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (NurPhoto via Getty Images)
As far as chess tournaments go, the Louisiana State Championship and Iowa Open are not what you would describe as big-time events.
The highest-ranked players from either event last year didn't even rank in the top 10,000 of the world FIDE rankings, or the top 1,000 among U.S. players. They are held in hotel ballrooms, with first-place prizes in the hundreds of dollars. These are tournaments mostly for local enthusiasts, playing because they enjoy chess. Some of them are children.
So that begs a question: What was Hikaru Nakamura, the world's No. 2 chess player and a man who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as a streamer, doing at those tournaments this year?
The answer is simultaneously funny, questionable, bureaucratic and bizarre.
The No. 2 chess player in the world is trying to brute force his way to the world chess championship
At the risk of explaining the obvious to fans, let's quickly go through the basic structure of elite chess.
Everyone wants to be the world chess champion, but only a precious few are capable of even knocking on the door. The world chess championship is held every two years and features two players, usually the reigning champ and a challenger, playing several games until one of them clinches the majority of points available. Last year, Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju defeated champion Ding Liren with three wins, two losses and nine ties in 14 games.
Next year's championship will see Gukesh face a challenger, and that challenger is decided by the Candidates Tournament, an experience arguably more brutal than the championship itself. Each year, eight of the best non-champion players in the world play each other in a round robin, with the top player winning a shot at the champ.
There are several ways to get one of the eight spots in the Candidates Tournament. Seven players will qualify for 2026 by performing well in one of three events: the FIDE Grand Swiss Tournament, the FIDE World Cup and the FIDE Circuit (which is itself a series of tournaments).
However, one last spot is reserved for the non-qualified player with the highest average rating from the previous August to January. And that is where Nakamura comes in.
The American has previously competed in three Candidates Tournaments and came just short last year, finishing a half-point behind Gukesh. He wants to play in the 2026 Candidates Tournament, but does not plan to compete in the required tournaments. So he's going for the rating spot instead, which comes with some strings attached.
Most notably, Nakamura is required to compete in 40 FIDE-sanctioned games during that six-month period in which he has to be the highest-ranked eligible player (fortunately for him, world No. 1 and former champion Magnus Carlsen has no plans to compete for his abdicated title again).
That left Nakamura needing to play a certain number of games, preferably without risking his No. 2 ranking. As he explained a few months ago, via sponsor Chess.com, his plan was to "go and find some Mickey Mouse tournaments and get to 40 games," rather than face elite opponents and risk lowering his rating.
Welcome to Iowa @GMHikaruWatch live at https://t.co/DCMjq4v0nTThanks to Allie Hengen for the photos! pic.twitter.com/3J8fzB0aEv
— US Chess (@USChess) September 6, 2025
And that's why one of the best chess players in the world is competing at some of the most random tournaments imaginable, because the only thing he can't do is lose. He ran the table in Louisiana and Iowa this month, and still needs to play 11 more games by the end of the year.
What are these chess games like?
If you need a visual for what a game between a player with Nakamura's rating (2807) and his first opponent's rating (1915) looks like, imagine Paul Skenes showing up to a community college game in a world where those somehow counted for a Cy Young Award innings requirement.
Some games were closer than others, but Nakamura won all 12 without much trouble. His first Iowa game was so easy that he finished with more time on the clock than when he started. His final Iowa game saw him clinch the title against 13-year-old Artemii Khanbutaev.
World #2 @gmhikaru versus the #11 13-year-old in the United States. For all the Iowa Open marbles. Watch live at https://t.co/IqaYRusZ4zpic.twitter.com/xXn7g4JbJw
— US Chess (@USChess) September 7, 2025
Via Chess.com, Nakamura saw that game as an exercise in benevolence:
"It is an opportunity to give back. For example, this final opponent I played, this 12-year-old kid, he's someone who's working with a very strong grandmaster and a former U.S. champion. I'm sure he and his coach will go over this game, he'll learn from it, and I have no doubt he'll probably go on to become at least an international master down the road. It's an experience I think he will cherish for a very long time."
Even a tie would have seen Nakamura lose significant points due to his opponent's lower rating, but he is benefiting from the fact that wins will always increase his rating, just by an negligibly small amount.
Is what Hikaru Nakamura is doing precedented?
Definitely.
In the last cycle, grandmaster Alireza Firouzja competed in a series of matches at his club as well as the Rouen Open to feed his rating and pass Wesley So as the top-rated player not already in the tournament. That situation actually led to governing body FIDE changing the rules and adding the six-month average to the ratings requirement to prevent similar incidents.
In 2022, Ding was in a position similar to Nakamura's, needing to play several games to meet a requirement. In that case, COVID-19 had wreaked havoc with Ding's ability to travel for international tournaments, so the Chinese Chess association responded by organizing three rated events to let him reach the threshold and improve his rating.
In theory, the Candidates Tournament should feature the world's top players and including a spot for the highest-rated player should help that goal, as tournaments can be fickle. In practice, some players will do whatever they need to make their number go up or keep it up.
We are simply watching incentives at work.
How do the guys getting steamrolled feel about Hikaru Nakamura?
They really don't seem to mind.
Yes, getting blown out is embarrassing in a vacuum, but you need to remember that all of these guys are huge chess fans and Nakamura is one of the celebrities of the chess world. Odds are these players will never get another chance to face a player of Nakamura's caliber, so these are "tell your grandkids" experiences for them.
A couple of his Louisiana opponents even seemed to show up in the comments of his YouTube video breaking down the games:
I'm Harry [James]! That was pretty unbelievable. Lasting 44 moves in a tournament game against Hikaru is something I will always remember!
I'm Nahum [Jose Villamil] (the 3rd game guy). Imagine signing up for your first official tournament in years, in a foreign country, and seeing one of your childhood idols showing up in his journey to the world title. It felt like that time that some Paraguayan inmates were hosting a futbol tournament in jail and one of the teams showed up with Ronaldinho hahaha. In two words: a dream. I was paired against an absolute icon, got a nice chat, pictures, a signed sheet, and now a recap of my mistakes haha. What else can you ask for? That he gets to win the world title and to be a little part of that. Thank
Another thanked Nakamura on X:
Thanks for the game @GMHikaru ! From watching your streams as a kid to having an opportunity to play you OTB. Absolutely honored!
— Ralph Federick Tan (@RalphTan37) August 31, 2025
Nakamura also seems to be enjoying himself through all this, with the proceedings giving him nice fodder for his social media channels.
What do the other grandmasters think about Hikaru Nakmura?
They really do seem to mind, or at least some of them.
A few grandmasters have been highly critical of Nakamura and the system that is allowing him to do this.
Year after year @fide_chess literally doesn't care about the rating spot in the Candidates 🧘🏻♂️
— Ian Nepomniachtchi (@lachesisq) August 31, 2025
🗣 "The fact you can qualify to the Candidates without playing Grand Swiss, World Cup... what he does is quite timid and not really that ambitious."Hans Niemann shares his thoughts on Hikaru Nakamura 👀♟#FIDEGrandSwisspic.twitter.com/bvcadxOIMv
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) September 11, 2025
I am wondering if @fidechess will step in and disallow legal events from being rated again, to gloss over how ridiculous the rating spot is... Nakamura is a great player and have done immense things for chess. But his path to the Candidates should go through elite level events.… pic.twitter.com/kfVw8RivNl
— GM Jacob Aagaard (@GMJacobAagaard) August 30, 2025
On the other hand, some have defended Nakamura, with Carlsen even praising his shamelessness (while also lightly critiquing the system).
Carlsen on Nakamura's Candidates run: "I kind of admire the way he's going about it because it's so shameless... it's the pragmatic and probably the right thing to do." "It looks like it's a system that could do with some fixing, but I'm not part of that s*** anymore." pic.twitter.com/ZnJZVpxSAF
— chess24 (@chess24com) September 9, 2025
Fake moral outrage!Earlier today, I posted about Hikaru Nakamura 7-0 results in the Louisiana State Chess Championship. It is very rare for a world class player to play in small open tournaments, on his own dime. Hikaru did not do this in secrets. He openly tweeted and… pic.twitter.com/zb9oyjCdl5
— Susan Polgar (@SusanPolgar) September 2, 2025
It should be reiterated, Nakamura isn't doing this to gain points so much as not lose them. He reached that No. 2 ranking with an incredible career resurgence in his mid-30s and held onto the ranking by performing well against elite opponents at The American Cup and Norway Chess this year. Now, he's trying to increase his number of games played with as little risk as possible.
Still, the situation has reached the point where grandmasters are openly plotting to sabotage him, with grandmaster Hans Niemann pondering a $10,000 bounty to grandmasters if they track Nakamura and beat him in one of the "Mickey Mouse" tournaments, for "the greater good of chess."
"Every victory is 10,000 dollars, all expenses included" - @HansMokeNiemann shares his plan to track Hikaru's whereabouts and pay Grandmasters to play in the tournaments he is playing in, as @anishgiri and @levonaronian join in. pic.twitter.com/FRTfa0prtF
— ChessBase India (@ChessbaseIndia) September 8, 2025
It should be noted that Nakamura has a contentious history with Niemann, most notably when he provided the spark that set off the firestorm in the infamous Niemann-Carlsen cheating dispute. Niemann later filed a $100 million lawsuit that listed Nakamura among the defendants.
Overall, Nakamura has quite a reputation in the chess community. A lot of people just don't like the guy, and he has given some of them plenty of reason, like when one of his feuds with a streaming channel run by a pair of Canadian grandmasters resulted in a massive airing of grievances and a video showing him losing a yard fight with one of them.
Source: "AOL Sports"
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