London Classic Round 3: Berlins (almost) busted

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave scored the only win of Round 3 of the London Chess Classic, condemning Veselin Topalov to his second defeat, but we could easily have seen four decisive games. Fabiano Caruana and Alexander Grischuk built up huge advantages from the opening but lax technique and time management allowed Hikaru Nakamura and Anish Giri to escape. Vishy Anand and Magnus Carlsen could both have won, and lost, a remarkable game.

The omens were poor when four of the five games on Sunday started with the Ruy Lopez, three saw the Berlin Defence and two went for the infamous Berlin Wall. Nigel Short’s joy was unbridled:

As it happened, though, there was only one instantly forgettable game – the non-Berlin Ruy Lopez between Mickey Adams and Levon Aronian. The Armenian no. 1 worried his English rival by blitzing out the first 19 moves, but Mickey remained precise and eventually scored the moral victory of making Aronian, in his own words, “abandon all desires to win”. If you’re interested in that game don't miss the enjoyable post-mortem:

When it was pointed out that decisive results looked on the cards in the other games Adams quipped:

When you have the Berlin you always have decisive games - it's normal!

So let’s take a look, starting with the game where Fabiano Caruana played the Anti-Berlin (4.d3) against Hikaru Nakamura, and soon got a close to winning position.

Hikaru pinpointed this as the moment he went astray:

Caruana played this 9.Qe2 move and I think I was too aggressive. When I played 9…b5 it was based on a miscalculation. After 10.Ne3 Nb6 11.Nf5 Bxf5 12.exf5 I wanted to go 12…e4 and then used 30 minutes and realised it didn’t work at all due to 13.Qxe4. It was just a very unpleasant surprise.

It may have been that Nakamura was seeing ghosts, since his attempts to chart a different path failed badly, until his position was all but busted after 18…f6?!

Black’s isolated, doubled c-pawns and White’s beautiful outpost for his knight on e4 suggested a world of suffering ahead for Nakamura, but he felt he caught a lucky break from Caruana’s decision here:

Now Fabiano played 19.Qc2, which wins a pawn, but it’s probably not the best way to play, at least for a human. After 19.Rfc1 I was going to go 19…Nb8 and just hope to put something on d5 and wait to lose, basically. After 19.Qc2 Fabiano wins a pawn, but queens come off the board, and actually here even though the knight’s very strong on e4 I’m going to be getting a knight on d5.

It still wasn’t plain sailing, but in the end Caruana’s edge slipped away and he took a draw by repetition on move 45.

Hikaru Nakamura had more reason to be grateful:

The Berlin Walls both saw White come close to getting the win that eluded Garry Kasparov in his 2000 World Championship match against Vladimir Kramnik. The clearest case was Grischuk-Giri, which took a walk on the wild side on move 20:

Anish Giri’s 19…Ke6 plunged Alexander Grischuk into thought, since while he said he knew the pawn ending after 19…Nxd6 was won for White he couldn’t remember how to reply to Giri’s move:

I knew the position was somehow promising, but I didn’t remember how, and I didn’t want just to make a draw quickly. So I thought, thought and thought forever [before playing 20.f4], and then Anish played 20…Rad8, after which it’s just completely lost for Black.

In this case “forever” is only a slight hyperbole, since Grischuk, as you can see on our broadcast system, thought for 1 hour, 3 minutes and 31 seconds over his 20th move. It felt even longer for Giri, who blamed his immediate blunder on being knocked out of the rhythm of play:

If not for time trouble Black can just resign… He missed a win when he thought for 1 hour and 20 minutes - if he thought for 1 hour and 10 minutes the extra ten minutes would have made the difference!

Giri had been risking his first loss in the whole Grand Chess Tour series, but explained why he felt his survival wasn’t undeserved:

I must say that it’s completely random that I managed to draw a dead-lost position, but I think it was a little exaggerated. Of course it knocked me out this long think, but there was also justice at the end that I had at least one hour more on the clock. When some cheap tricks appeared they worked.

The game got away from Grischuk at around move 32-33, with Giri needing to foresee one resource:

38.Ne8! saved the day. You can watch the players reflect on that extraordinary encounter below:

The one game that could have gone either way was the now classic encounter between World Champion Magnus Carlsen and the man he took the title from, Vishy Anand. 

Despite losing the two matches things have been looking up for Vishy, who won a great game against Magnus in Norway Chess this year. At some point it seemed history might repeat itself, with the opening not exactly going well for the World Champion, as his second Jon Ludvig Hammer confirmed:

Magnus hung in there, though, and found some precise moves to strike back (Anand called 28…g5! very clever). Then Vishy lamented what happened next:

It looked fantastic, but Black is always resilient, so you try to find the most exact way… and of course I had no difficulty at all in finding some really stupid continuation and suddenly I’m just lost. 34…Na5! somehow didn’t even cross my mind.

The culprit was 34.Re3?:

Danny King quizzed Vishy on his aim in playing the move:

Well, it wasn’t to half out, to put it mildly, and I succeeded, but not the way I intended! The plan was to get the king to the queenside…This sort of stuff is just embarrassing.

That echoed Magnus Carlsen, who had earlier commented, “It was a bit embarrassing for both of us”. The lion’s share of Magnus’ winning chances seemed to slip away on the time control move:

Here he went for the mysterious 40…Rh8, while our silicon friends were crying out for 40…Nxe5.

After 41.Bf2! Nxe5 42.axb5 Nxg4 43.bxc6+ Kxc6 44.Bd4 the worst was over for Vishy, and while it’s never entirely comfortable to play “a position only Magnus could win” against Magnus himself, the Indian star had calculated all the tricks – as you can see in the post-mortem:

So that leaves us with the one non-Ruy Lopez of the round – a Sicilian Najdorf in which Maxime Vachier-Lagrave found himself on the white side for a change. 

The opening was a fascinating strategic struggle, but it all began to go wrong for Veselin Topalov on move 22:

He played 22…Qf6?, which left the b7-bishop undefended and opened the door to 23.Qb5! – “once you allow Qb5 things are not easy”, Maxime explained afterwards. 22…Qe7! would have kept the game in the balance.

Instead Topalov was forced to try and generate a kingside counterattack to offset his strategic collapse on the queenside, but time trouble proved his undoing, and his response to the game’s second Qb5 was sheer desperation:

36…Rxf2+? 37.Kxf2 Qc2+ 38.Qe2 Resigns

Maxime therefore joined Giri in the London Chess Classic lead on 2/3. He explained afterwards that his motivation isn’t actually to win the series, but to qualify for next year:

I have absolutely no chance to qualify for the Grand Chess Tour if I don’t finish in the Top 3. I think I have to be minimum second, and actually first would be better - to be sure. No pressure!

Watch his full post-game session:

Veselin, meanwhile, came into the 2015 Grand Chess Tour as the leader, but is now the only player to have lost a game in London – and in fact after two defeats he’s only on 0.5/3. To add insult to injury, his pre-tournament world no. 2 spot has been taken by his arch-rival:

There’s no time for bitter reflections, though, since in Round 4 on Monday he plays Caruana. Nakamura-Anand is perhaps the pick of the ties, though Carlsen will no doubt be looking to continue his impressive record against his sometime second Adams:

Tune in to the live show with GM Jan Gustafsson and assorted guests at the two-hour later “weekday” time slot of 16:00 in London (17:00 CET).

You can also watch all the games in our mobile apps:

See also:

• Official tournament website
• All the games with computer analysis here on chess24
• London Chess Classic Preview
• Round 1: Giri tricks Topalov
• Round 2: Not a classic