Games from the World Rapid & Blitz Championships
20 highlights (and lowlights) from last week's action.
There were many interesting games in the event, and I hope some of you will mention them in the comments. For now, here are 20 games from the World Rapid & Blitz Championships. Most of them feature Magnus Carlsen, but other players show up as well. Some games have significant annotations, others just a comment or two. Overall though, I hope it’s a nice sample of the action from this great event.
Thanks a lot for putting in the work Dennis! Great insights and instructive notes.
There was context and a given explanation (while at least according to arbiters and others not an excuse) for the Dubov-Nepo "creativity": an earlier round had been delayed by an hour, thus it was already well into the evening local time - many players were "not amused"(maybe Carlsen was least affected because he could rest between rounds in a comfortable private lounge). GM Andrew Hong had lost on time against Yu Yangyi, claimed a malfunctioning clock and it took that long to decline his appeal.
Otherwise, nice analysis mainly of some non-Carlsen games, and nice summary on how/why Carlsen won both events. Even in the blitz game against Rapport, he benefited from rather big opponent mistakes in response to "pseudo-threats": 16.-a5? may have also been to prevent a4-a5-a6, which wouldn't have been such a big deal. Neither was 23.-Qxf5 24.Qxb6 - 24.-Qd7 and black will lose the a-pawn but is reasonably fine with some sort of a fortress. The direct 20.Bxa5 (20.-Bxf3 21.Bxb6, while engines even like 21.gxf3) seemed more accurate but here black can't go "as wrong" as in the actual game.
Fedoseev-Carlsen in rapid was also called a masterpiece, Dennis seems initially less impressed and I agree. Here a4-a5 would have been good for white, when Carlsen finally prevented it he was immediately "rewarded" with 15.h5?! (such white kingside advances also eventually backfired in some other games against Carlsen). Carlsen let Fedoseev back into the game several times, only after 31.f4? (another kingside pawn move) the subsequent conversion was smooth.
In the more tactical blitz games, Carlsen was more vulnerable (it doesn't surprise me, it's not his typical style). But also here he got analogous mistakes: 21.Rxh7?? from a FM, 35.-Rxb2?? from Vokhidov and the "in-between" 34.-Rd2?? from Sarana (suddenly playing for a win and completely neglecting his own king safety?). Fact is that Carlsen had squandered his earlier advantage that arose from an objectively insipid "anti-Sicilian" setup.