Magnus Carlsen of Norway retained the Fide World Chess Championship title, defeating Ian Nepomniachtchi in Dubai, on Friday.

Needing a point to seal the deal in game 11 itself, Carlsen, playing with black, capitalised on Nepomniachtchi’s blunder on move 23 to record his fourth win of the 14-game series.

Nepomniachtchi resigned after 49 moves and 3 hours and 21 minutes. Seven games ended in a draw and the final score read 7.5-3.5.

“I’m relieved, of course,” Carlsen said after the game. “It’s hard to feel that great joy when the situation was so comfortable to begin with, but I’m happy with a very good performance overall.”

Asked to assess his performance over the course of the match, Carlsen said: “You can point those things you could have done differently in every game of course, but overall I’m happy with my play, very proud of my effort in the sixth game, and that sort of laid the foundation for everything.

“The final score is probably a bit more lopsided than it could have been, but that’s the way I think some of the other matches also could have gone if I had gotten a lead.”

The sixth game on December 4 was the longest in the history of World Chess Championship matches, lasting seven hours 45 minutes. That was Carlsen’s first win and after that there was no looking back. He logged one point each in the eighth, ninth and Friday’s games.

Carlsen had defeated Viswanathan Anand in 2013 and 2014, Sergey Karjakin in 2016 and Fabiano Caruana in 2018.