Hikaru Nakamura stormed to a 4:0 lead on Day 1 of the Chess.com Global Championship Finals, with Jan-Krzysztof Duda playing the Bongcloud in the final game of the day. Wesley So missed mate-in-2 but still leads Dmitry Andreikin 3:1, while Anish Giri and Sam Sevian lead Teimour Radjabov and Nihal Sarin 2.5:1.5.
Nakamura was perhaps not the ideal person to try the Bongcloud against
The Chess.com Global Championship Finals is an 8-player event with a $500,000 prize fund, including $200,000 for the winner. The players were originally supposed to all be in one location in Toronto, Canada, but travel issues meant three of the players, Dmitry Andreikin, Teimour Radjabov and Nihal Sarin, are instead in Belgrade, Serbia.
Each match is played over two days and 8 games, where the players have 15 minutes for all their moves, plus a 2-second increment per move from move 1. If the scores are tied 4:4 an Armageddon game is played, exactly as in the Fischer Random World Championship, where White has 15 minutes and the players bid for the lowest time they’re willing to accept to play Black and have draw odds.
After Day 1 of the finals there’s a leader in every match.
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Hikaru Nakamura came into the Global Championship after winning the Fischer Random World Championship in Iceland and adapted like a fish to water to having the pieces in the same starting position each game.
Nakamura defeated Ian Nepomniachtchi to win $150,000 | photo: Lennart Ootes
In Game 1 he got an early attack against Jan-Krzysztof Duda’s Petroff and was razor-sharp when it was time to convert a positional edge into something more tangible.
32.Nxb7! Qxb7 (just allowing White to pick up the pawns on b7 and a6 won’t save Black) 33.Qe8+ Kg7 34.Bf8+ Nxf8 35.Re7+ Qxe7 36.Qxe7+ Kg8 37.Qxg5+ Rg7 38.Qxf5.
Three pieces would normally be more than enough compensation for a queen, but Hikaru has also picked up three pawns and has a winning advantage. With more time Duda might still have been able to hold on in the play that followed, but in the end Hikaru was the only player to win the first game of his match.
Duda’s big chance came in Game 2, when he had a winning edge with White but traded away too much of his advantage by swapping off queens before slumping to defeat.
When he lost Game 3 without much of a fight, the Polish no. 1 felt something had to change, and he's a fan of radical solutions. When he went 2:0 down to Shakhriyar Mamedyarov on Day 2 of the recent Aimchess Rapid final he decided not to try and fight back to 2:2 but instead take a quick draw — sending the match immediately to blitz tiebreaks.
That paid off to perfection as he won 2:0, but this time round the solution may have been a little too radical!
The king moved again, to f2, on move 6, and although at times Duda came within touching distance of equality the outcome of the game had long looked inevitable before it was over.
A 4th defeat for Duda means that on Thursday he would have to win all four games just to force an Armageddon decider.
Hikaru was interviewed afterwards by Nemo Qiyu Zhou and commented:
I feel pretty good! Obviously a somewhat unexpected score, but I played well, three good games, then the last game Duda decided to have some fun and it didn’t quite work out for him… It was very clear he was on tilt when he did this. I thought he would try to play something more normal, but again, against a player of your own calibre, where they can just play sensible moves, it’s obviously absolute garbage, so there’s a reason it’s a meme!
Magnus Carlsen once played the arguably even worse 1.f3 2.Kf2 and beat Wesley So in a competitive game, but it’s hard to argue with Hikaru’s “don’t try this at home”.
A curiosity of the match was that Duda went into it with the higher rapid rating, and since the games are actually FIDE-rated that meant they swapped places on the live rating list.
Duda will at least pick up $25,000 even if he loses the match, while if Nakamura wins he plays the winner of Wesley So vs. Dmitry Andreikin.
This was a match that got off to a crazy start, with Dmitry Andreikin, playing from Belgrade, launching a winning attack, before he stopped for a minute in this position.
Black has given up a rook, but has four pawns in return and also what looks like it must be a crushing attack on the defenceless white king. It’s not so easy, however, since any discovered check by moving the bishop spoils the advantage. The clearest win seems to be 28…Qe5!, preparing to give checkmate with 29…Bf4+, but after 29.Re1 it’s still tricky — in fact the best move then is the flashy 29…Qf4!
Instead Andreikin just decided to “make a move”, with 28…a5!?, but was hit by 29.Ne4! and suddenly White is alive. A few moves later and we got an incredible situation.
Here, with two minutes on his clock, Wesley So missed one of the easiest tactics imaginable for a player of his stratospheric level: 34.Qa7+ Bb7 (the only legal move) 35.Qxb7# would have been checkmate.
Instead after 34.Rd4?? Dmitry could have won, but not with 34…f5?, which gave Wesley another chance to play almost the same tactic. This time he needed to start with the sacrificial 35.Rxd5+! so he could then follow up with 36.Qa7+.
Wesley chose 35.Rg7+? and forced a draw by perpetual check.
Wesley was unable to defend his title in Reykjavik | photo: Lennart Ootes
That could have been a tough blow to recover from, but instead Wesley bounced straight back to launch a sacrificial kingside attack of his own with the black pieces and comfortably convert his advantage.
He then took a quick draw with the white pieces, and perhaps lulled Dmitry into a false sense of security in the final game. It looked to be heading for a draw, but when Dmitry offered a draw it was rejected, and Wesley showed why by eventually reaching a winning pawn endgame to take a significant 3:1 lead.
So is in Toronto, with Andreikin in Belgrade and represented by a screen
The other matches were much tighter, with Anish Giri and Teimour Radjabov taking turns to force a draw by repetition in positions where they were better in the first two games. The reason for the caution was perhaps illustrated in the critical third game, where Teimour played too aggressively and allowed Anish to take over and win.
Sam Sevian wasn’t expecting to be in Toronto after losing to Levon Aronian in the qualifier, but when Levon dropped out he got a chance, and he took full advantage to lead India’s Nihal Sarin 2.5:1.5 after a powerful win with the black pieces in Game 2.
It could easily have been 3:1, but Nihal Sarin managed to cling on a piece down in the final game of the day, finally holding a Rook vs. Rook + Knight endgame in 121 moves.
Sam Sevian had been paired to play a rematch against Hans Niemann in Round 1 of the Fall Chess Classic in St. Louis, before getting the late invite to Toronto.
The Chess.com Global Championship Finals continues on Thursday at 17:00 CET with the semi-finalists set to be decided.
Watch the Chess.com Global Championship Finals here on chess24.
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