Hikaru Nakamura

"Chess Life: Let’s begin by talking about your return to the Candidates tournament. What does it mean to you at this point in your career to be a Candidate once more? Hikaru Nakamura: First and foremost, it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It was not really an objective of mine when I chose to play in the (2022) FIDE Grand Prix. I was very fortunate to be granted a wild card by the FIDE president, Arkady Dvorkovich. I went into the event wanting to see if I could still cut it against the best players in the world. As most people know, I’ve been streaming a lot over the last couple of years. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I still feel I am quite competitive [with the top players]. I wanted to see how it would go, but there were really no illusions — or delusions, you could say — of qualifying for the Candidates for me.Even after the first event, which I did win, it [qualifying] was not anything that I was thinking about in a serious way. Then in the second event, probably one of the worst possible results [from my perspective] occurred with [GM] Richard Rapport winning, and [GM] Maxime [Vachier-Lagrave] and [GM] Anish [Giri] having fairly... decent results.Before the third event started, I knew the groups weren’t very favorable with [GM] Levon [Aronian] being in mine. I never really was thinking about [qualifying] until I won this game against Levon in the fourth round of the third FIDE Grand Prix. Prior to that, I knew there were chances. Everyone [was] talking about it when I’m streaming and so forth, but it really wasn’t something that I was thinking about."