Grenke Chess Classic Underway

Not-very-rapid Rapid Chess with the World Champions

The Candidates Tournament is coming, but since it’s a week and a half away (who can endure such a wait?) there’s no reason why more chess can’t be crammed in between now and then. And so we have the Grenke Chess Classic, a multi-stage six player event with the following participants: the last two world champions (Ding Liren and Magnus Carlsen), two former Candidates (Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Richard Rapport), and two players from the host country (Germany - Vincent Keymer and Daniel Fridman).

Despite the “Classic” moniker it’s a rapid (45’+10”) event, which works like this. First, there’s a double-round robin. There are two rounds per day (with a rest day on Friday, after the first three days of play), and once that’s over it’s time for stage 2: two game matches (with blitz playoffs as needed) between the players in first and second, third and fourth, and fifth and sixth.

The action started today, and in round 1 it was largely inaction. Keymer-Fridman and Ding-MVL were nothingburgers, while Rapport-Carlsen had more tension but also looked likely to finish as the third draw of the round. Instead, Carlsen made the sort of blunder a 1000-rated player would blush at (it happens!) and immediately lost.

Rapport consolidated the win with an easy draw in round 2 against Ding (well, easy because Ding acceded to a repetition of moves right out of the opening in a better position), but the other two games had some drama. Keymer had a winning knight ending against Vachier-Lagrave, but a couple of misjudgments let the Frenchman escape.

Meanwhile, Carlsen played very aggressively with Black against Fridman, by far the lowest-rated player in the field, and he was ultimately rewarded with a win. Carlsen was tactically shaky in this game, too, blundering with 32…g3. If he had taken his time and missed Fridman’s idea, then okay, that can happen. But he moved immediately, not even bothering to consider that Fridman’s long think several moves earlier might have had, you know, an actual point to it. It was a very nice trap by the German that let him reestablish equality…of a sort - the sort where the engine says “0.00” but one player can continue forever without any risk while the other player is sweating bullets trying to find one critical defensive idea after another. In the end, Fridman failed to find all the ideas he needed to, and Carlsen won after all.

So, Rapport is in clear first with a +1 score, Fridman in clear last with -1, and everyone else is on 50%. Here are today’s games, with some comments here and there.