Airthings Masters, Day 2

The favorites squeak through to the sorta-finals.

Given the double-elimination setup, the fact that the winners’ bracket is down to Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura doesn’t mean it’s the final - even if it may feel that way, even if it’s the match most of us want to see, and even though it may be reprised a couple of days later as the real final. We’ll see. At any rate, Mssrs. Carlsen and Nakamura both had to squeak by, drawing their respective Armageddon games with the black pieces.

For Carlsen, it didn’t seem as if there would be any problems at all. He convincingly defeated Arjun Erigaisi with White in the first game of their best-of-four match and drew easily with Black in the second. But then it went wrong in game 3, and he blundered under pressure, after which the match scores were equalized. He managed to regain his bearings, drawing smoothly with Black in game 4, and with Black again in the Armageddon game he was never in trouble and probably should have won. Still, a draw was enough, and he got it.

As for Nakamura’s match with Wesley So, it almost seemed as if they decided at some point during their second game to go straight for Armageddon. In game 1 Nakamura was never in trouble, but it was still a long, full fight before the players split the point. But game 2 was drawn in 28 moves, game 3 in 27, and the fourth game was the well-known Qe4+, Qd4, Qe4+ draw in the Berlin. That “slugfest” saw the players call it quits after just 14 moves. As for the Armageddon game, So never achieved anything with White, and Nakamura was the only one who had winning chances before they finally split the point.

In my previous post, I already mentioned what happened in the losers’ bracket: Alexey Sarana defeated Alireza Firouzja 2-0, booting Firouzja from the event with an overall 0-5 score. Oof. Dommaraju Gukesh had a much more competitive match against Rauf Mamedov, needing to win with White in the Armageddon game to prevail.

I’ll be occupied with non-chess matters (apparently such things do exist) for the next 2-3 days, but will catch up on the results and games sometime this weekend - at least that’s the plan. Sorry, and thank you for your forbearance.