Magnus Carlsen's magnificent performance at the Pearl Spring super-tournament in Nanjing, China, ended on a historic high as the Norwegian teenager won a truly remarkable tournament victory.

With the tournament already in the bag going into the final round, Carlsen saved the best till last by beating Dmitry Jakovenko for a final +6 winning score of 8/10 and a tournament performance of 3008 - remarkably, 2.5-points ahead (!) of his nearest rival, world #1 Veselin Topalov.

Many players in a similar situation would have opted for a safe last round draw - but not Carlsen! The teenage ace proved ruthlessly Bobby Fischer-like in his execution by winning every game with White following his exciting last round victory (annotated below for ICC members by GM Larry Chrisitiansen in our GOTD selection; and for non-members, a free 5 min preview). His determination in doing so was to tip his live rating over the Rubicon of the 2800 barrier.

His next super-tournament outing will be the Tal Memorial next month in Moscow (which will be covered live here on ICC Chess.FM) that also includes World Champion Viswanathan Anand, Vassily Ivanchuk, Alexander Morozevich and Peter Svidler -- and a good result there could see him becoming the new world #1 before the end of the year.

If he does, he will become -- at 19 by then -- by far the youngest ever to achieve that distinction and only the seventh since the current ranking system began in 1970. The others who have been #1 are Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Anand and Topalov, all of whom were world champions.

Carlsen's epoch-making result in Nanjing is covered with eight GOTD selections chosen by the Chess.FM team of GMs Joel Benjamin, Larry Christiansen, Nick de Firmian, Gregory Kaidanov and Ronen Har-Zvi. GOTD is a member-only service here on ICC; but for non-members we have a free 5 min preview of each GOTD also. To upgrade to view in full Carlsen's remarkable performance (and all our other Chess.FM videos and regular weekly shows), join ICC today!

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