Chess 9LX and Ultimate Moves in St. Louis

Fabiano Caruana, Garry Kasparov, and Mr. Monopoly

The month between now and the start of the World Championship will be mostly quiet when it comes to top-level chess. There’s always Titled Tuesdays (won today by Magnus Carlsen and Alireza Firouzja), and right now there’s a Chess960 event underway in St. Louis. It’s a very strong 10-player round-robin featuring all the top American GMs (Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Leinier Dominguez, Wesley So, Levon Aronian, Ray Robson, Sam Shankland, defending champ Sam Sevian, and Grigoriy Oparin) except you-know-who, and the tenth player has probably spent more time in the U.S. than most of the other participants: one Garry Kasparov.

Six of nine rounds are in the books, and Caruana leads with an undefeated 5/6, half a point ahead of Nakamura, whom he defeated on day one. (They play three games each day.) Two players are a point behind: Sevian - which isn’t so surprising given that he won the event last year - and Kasparov - which is. (This wouldn’t have been so surprising a few years back, but his increasing rust has left him looking increasingly out of place in these St. Louis shindigs in recent years. It’s good to see him playing competently again. Thus far he has wins against Dominguez and Shankland and a loss to So, and was winning against Nakamura in round 6 before time pressure led him to make a draw by repetition.)

There have been some very nice games - accessible games, too - as you’ll see included in IM Kostya Kavutskiy’s nice recap videos for day 1 and day 2. (Full broadcast replays are here: day 1 and day 2.) And if you’d like to see some normal games featuring these players, “Ultimate Moves” on day 1 featured Team Rex vs. Team “Mr. Monopoly” (presumably Randy Sinquefield) playing a best-of-10 game blitz match. The general format was the usual: Rex Sinquefield and his son/Mr. Monopoly (commemorating a special St. Louis edition of the popular family fight generator board game, which includes a square for the World Chess Hall of Fame) play the first five moves, and then pairs of GMs substitute in for every succeeding five move series. After all five pairs of GMs have had their five moves, it’s back to Rex and Mr. M for another five moves, and so on.

In general Rex and Randy S. have produced howlers almost from move 1, but this time around the openings were pretty decent. Moreover, while they often made errors when they had a second time at bat, almost all the games were settled by the GMs. It wasn’t that bad. The broadcast can be watched here, and I’ll note three things that caught my eye. First, around an hour and a half in Aronian’s team forfeits the game. It wasn’t initially clear to me what had happened, but after a bit I realized that Aronian had played a sixth straight move rather than getting up after his fifth move.

Second, in one of the first games - maybe the first game - Shankland played poorly during his series of moves and Kasparov, who followed him that round and resigned that game for the team, kept whining about Shankland’s play. After the round Maurice Ashley was chatting with/interviewing him, giving him one leading question after another essentially pleading with him to cut Shankland some slack. By the fifth or sixth question Kasparov said something that could be interpreted - if one is in a charitable mode or inclined to clutch at straws - as extending Shankland the tiniest bit of grace. It was embarrassing.

Third, and connected to the second point, my impression was that the weakest link (among the GMs) the rest of the way was none other than…Kasparov. To his credit, Shankland didn’t take the opportunity to repay the favor. (Which, to be fair, he shouldn’t. Kasparov may not be able to sustain 2700-level play at this point, but he’s 61 and hasn’t played as a professional for almost 20 years. And when he did retire, he had been the world’s #1 player for 20 years. As great a player as Shankland is, there’s only one guy on the planet who can get into a you-know-whatting match with Kasparov, and that guy isn’t playing. And today, as noted above, Kasparov beat Shankland in the Chess960 tournament.)

I like the Ultimate Moves format, but it would be nice if the participants were limited to a field without amateurs and Kasparov. (Only because this is the only event of its sort each year. If there were other such events during the year, having this sort of “pro-am” would be fine.) It’s probably not going to happen, as Sinquefield is the sponsor, and I can certainly understand why he wants to be a part of it. Maybe he can cut the match in half, with he and Randy participating in the first half and the GMs alone in the second half? Anyway, if the cost of his continuing generosity to the chess community is his participation in Ultimate Moves, it’s a trivial price to pay.