Hikaru Nakamura

World No.2, streamer

“I’m going to say one funny thing about ‘farming’ to make it to the event, since he doesn’t understand the definition of the words. The irony about this guy saying this is that when people have done things, specifically Ding Liren did something that was questionable to get into the Candidates, he went on to become World Champion. That is completely missed by this guy, Ding Liren played 30 games in one month and it was very questionable. Levon Aronian publicly complained about it. He wrote a letter to the US Chess Federation saying it was complete nonsense, Ding should not be qualified for the tournament. We saw how it turned out, he ended up finishing in second place and he ended up winning the World Championship. There is already historical precedent for something that was ‘wrong’ and someone getting rewarded for it. So, it’s kind of funny.

There is also another big problem, people seem to forget that literally every serious tournament I played for the last three years plus, I gained like 80 rating points. I went from 2736 after I retired from chess in 2019 all the way back up to 2808. Literally playing top level tournaments against the best players. Whenever I play the top players, I always show up and I have a good result. I have not had a seriously bad result in the last couple of years since I came back to chess. I find it funny whenever people look at these games and say: ‘Oh, you’re farming, you’re playing weak players!’. I find it very funny whenever I see people not doing proper research and ignoring the reality.

What is this guy smoking? Terrible predictions, just ridiculous. Let’s leave it at that.”