The Super Six have been living up to their billing so far! | photo: Ray Morris-Hill
So let’s begin. Cue drum roll…
Before the game it was all smiles between Kramnik and 15-year-old Naomi Wei (rated 1762) | photo: Ray Morris-Hill
Vladimir Kramnik wins this award... for deceiving us. The first round of the Rapidplay event pitted the crème de la crème of world chess against young juniors who had a snowball’s chance in hell of withstanding the onslaught. While Kramnik’s fellow elite grandmasters went straight for the jugular, though, blitzing out aggressive moves with no consideration for their opponents, it seemed Vladimir was going to ease his way home. Yes, he would win, but in a slow, unflashy style that minimised his opponent’s suffering. He played an unambitious opening and then exchanged off queens early on…
…then this happened:
How could you, Vlad? 
(replay the whole
game here)
It doesn’t get much better than this. White, International Master Ali Mortazavi, is two pawns down, but just look at the beautiful square in which he’s arranged four of his remaining pawns!
Fabiano Caruana couldn’t resist spoiling the pawn structure in a couple more moves by capturing on f5, but that only led to pure mayhem. By the time he played 37…Qf4 it had all gone very wrong:
38.fxg6 hxg6 39.Rxg6+ Kxg6 and e.g. 40.Qxf8 is easily winning for White. Caruana was let off the hook with 38.Rf1, though, after which he went into Hulk mode and put together a stunning sequence of power moves. Don’t miss replaying the game.
Frankly there were a lot of candidates here (see e.g. Gawain Jones 0-1 Caruana), but it was hard to match the ferocious ease with which Kramnik downed IM Richard Bates (2346).
On move 10
Richard thought for a couple of minutes before using a double attack to win an exchange
with 10.Ng5:
What followed was brutally efficient attacking chess from Kramnik, who finished with a flourish, queening his f-pawn:
After exchanges on f1 Qc6+ would pick up the white rook, so Bates resigned.
Up to a point it was all going well for multiple French Champion Sophie Milliet | photo: Ray Morris-Hill
Our last award for Vladimir Kramnik is a joint one, since
his opponent, 4-time French Champion Sophie Milliet, also had a big role to
play. Here’s a snapshot from their hugely tense Round 3 game:
A knight on the rim is dim, but what about four of them? What was even better was that Kramnik played 28.Na2! and 29.Nh2!! on consecutive moves, while Sophie was so impressed she immediately went for 29…Na3!!! (exclamation marks for aesthetic effect, although to be fair they were all sensible moves as well). In the diagram position Sophie, short on time, took a fateful decision. Some voice in her head must have warned her that it was unlikely the former World Champion sitting opposite had simply blundered a piece, but adrenaline took over and she removed a knight from the board with 32…Rxa2? (32…Qf6 was strictly the only move).
The punishment was swift and equine. 33.Ng4 and 35.Nf6+ soon led to mate – rather unsportingly Sophie resigned before Kramnik could mate with a pawn for the second time in three rounds (and get mate on the board for the third time in three rounds!), so we added the finishing touch:
Round 4, Board 1, and after 10 moves IM James Adair had this position against world no. 7 Hikaru Nakamura:
Hikaru no longer had anything better than at least picking up a pawn for the bishop with 10…Bxc2. And then? Well, Jonathan Rowson perhaps put it best:
But still, Adair nursed his advantage for almost 30
moves before he reached the following position:
To be fair, it’s already tricky, but 38.Nh4 or 38.Ne5 would have kept him on top. Instead 38.Nxf4? meant the end of his advantage, and three moves later he was lost. An amazing turnaround, which you can replay here.
Inspired by that escape Nakamura pulled off a 15-move win in the next game. His English opponent, Jonathan Hawkins, wrote a well-received book, “Amateur to IM”. In fact, he recently overshot that target to become a grandmaster elect.
He’ll probably want to forget this game in a hurry, though,
as the pawn on b2 and rook on a1 that his queen gobbled up turned out to be
laced with poison. You can’t get much more trapped than the black queen:
At least an honourable mention, though, should go to the black rook of Daniel Fernandez in a game where he initially seemed to have great chances of beating Loek van Wely:
This is also the final position.
It was a good day for veterans, with 58-year-old Jon Speelman beating Loek van Wely and drawing with Luke McShane to finish on 4.5/5. The greatest fairy tale, however, was that after four rounds and four wins 68-year-old IM Michael Basman made it onto the live boards, where he faced the world’s top junior, Anish Giri.
What followed was Basman's trademark move… 1.g4! – the famous Grob’s Attack.
Although Basman hit his rating peak over 30 years before
Giri was born, he emerged from the opening with a position that may even have
been better. In the end, though, it was the young star who handled the
complications better. Play through the game here.
There was a close runner-up for this award, though. World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen performed the ceremonial kick-off at a Real Madrid game for the second time in a year.
Real went on to win thanks to the efforts of the Magnus Carlsen of football, Cristiano Ronaldo.
So Giri, not Basman, moved to 5/5 and was joined in a streak of five wins by Nakamura, Caruana, Kramnik, Sadler and Howell. Anand and Adams are in a group of seven grandmasters just half a point behind (full standings here), and Daniel Gormally reminds us that it’s too early to count any chickens:
None of the above win the prize for the best winning streak, though, as that goes to Valentina Gunina, who after losing her first two games at the Russian Women’s Championship has now won her last six in a row. In Saturday’s Round 8 she outplayed Natalia Pogonina in a long manoeuvring game, although it wasn’t enough to break clear of Alisa Galliamova, who also won to share the lead going into the final round. As fate would have it they also meet in Sunday’s final round, with Alisa getting the white pieces. That game starts two hours earlier than usual at 11:00 CET, and if they draw they’ll face each other again in tiebreaks.
Can Valentina Gunina avoid the Curse of Caruana when she plays for a potential 7th win in a row on Sunday? | photo: Eteri Kublashvili, Russian Chess Federation
There are no streaks of any kind in the men’s event, and it’s frankly hard to summon up too much enthusiasm for the tournament as a spectator. Igor Lysyj (the Bald) is still half a point ahead before the final round, but his heroic days seem to be over. He lost in Round 7 but still retained a reduced lead since all the other games were drawn. In Round 8 he took a draw by repetition in an unclear position against Ian Nepomniachtchi, but once again no-one was able to catch him. He now has the black pieces against Boris Grachev in the final round, and must have excellent chances of overall victory. With Sergey Karjakin and Peter Svidler bottom of the table and the likes of Vladimir Kramnik and Alexander Grischuk elsewhere, though, this Russian Championship isn’t going to be looked back on as a classic.
This has to be Li Chao’s "snatching defeat from the claws of victory" game against Alexei Shirov from the Chess Bundesliga.
Over to the man who deserted Baden-Baden in their hour of need, Jan Gustafsson:
That just about rounds up all the day’s chess action, but before we end, one final award:
David Howell didn’t get to 5/5 just on the basis of his chess. I think you’ll agree he’s essentially unrecognisable when he goes from...
...to
Maybe he picked it up from Clark Kent.
So all that remains to say is… don’t miss Sunday’s chess action!
See also:
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