Candidates, Round 1

It's too soon to draw any conclusions.

Before the tournament started the players were in an eight-way tie for first. One round later and four draws later, they still are, even though seven of the eight players seemed open to more.

The marquee matchup between the top two seeds came closest to ending with a winner. With Black, Hikaru Nakamura chose the seldom-played 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 e5, generally considered dubious because of the seeming ease with which White can achieve a powerful grip over the d5 square without giving up anything substantial in return. It does seem that White gets an edge and a two-results middlegame (as happened in the game), but the advantage is smaller than one might expect given the 5…e5 line’s reputation.

That was the situation until the first critical moment, which came on Black’s 22nd move. His decision to play 22…Bc3, meeting 23.Rxb5 with 23…Rxf2, was an interesting attempt at sharpening the play. It was also a mistake, and after 24.Rbxd5! Qh4 25.Qd3! Rf6 26.g3! Black was in serious trouble, probably objectively lost. After 26…Qb4, however, it was Caruana’s turn to err. He needed to play 27.Rf1, and got a second chance after 27.Kg2? Bb2? (27…g6) to play 28.Rd7 and continue with 29.Rf1. Instead, 28.Rf5 was the wrong way to engineer a rook swap, and Nakamura was able to reach a tenable ending. His 32…Ra8! was especially nice, though by that point the game was headed for a draw in any case.

Both players had positive and negative takeaways from the game. Nakamura can feel good that his opening experiment held up and that he was able to save a difficult game, but may feel concerned that despite the advantage of surprise, preparation, and a serious lead on the clock Caruana managed to outplay him and achieve a winning position. For Caruana, the positive is that he found an excellent way of dealing with Nakamura’s surprise weapon and played essentially perfectly on the way to a winning advantage; the negative, obviously, is that he was unable to convert that advantage.

The other game that saw someone get a serious (though non-winning) advantage was between Alireza Firouzja and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa. Firouzja went for a rare line against Pragg’s Open Ruy, allowing his kingside pawns to be broken up in return for the bishop pair and the possibility of play down the g-file. In the game, both players went for kingside attacks - at the same time - and the position was in a tense balance through White’s 30.Nc5. Black’s best reply was 30…Nf8, but Pragg’s 30…Qh5 gave Firouzja the chance for an advantage with 31.Reg2, though proving it would require a series of precise moves. Instead, he played 31.Nxe6 Qxg4 32.Ng5, forcing Pragg to find either 32…Ne7 or 32…Ne5. He did, choosing the latter, and the knight sac was followed by a rook sac to give perpetual check.

Dommaraju Gukesh and Santosh Vidit played the shortest game in the number of moves, calling it quits after a repetition concluded after just 21 moves. The game had a lot of content though, and was not a matter of prep or going through the motions.

The same cannot be said for Nijat Abasov vs. Ian Nepomniachtchi. By move 13 of a normal opening - Nepo hadn’t done anything amazing requiring Abasov to slam on the brakes - Abasov was happy to kill the game to make a draw. Nepo tried for a while there wasn’t enough life in the position to make something happen, and the game finished with a repetition after White’s 34th move.

Let’s see if the tie can be broken in round 2. Here are the pairings:

• Nakamura - Vidit

• Praggnanandhaa - Gukesh

• Nepomniachtchi - Firouzja

• Caruana - Abasov

In the Women’s Candidates, the first three games to finish were also drawn, but Zhongyi Tan defeated Tingjie Lei to take the early lead in the tournament.

Here are all eight games, with notes to the open games and brief comments on Lei-Tan.