Sinquefield Cup, Round 4
Four draws, two missed opportunities, one win, zero Giuocos.
Today is a banner day for chess! The pestilential Giuoco Piano will be surely be back, but in round 4 of the Sinquefield Cup the players gave us all a gift as 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 (3…Bc5) didn’t appear on a single board. We all thank you.
The day’s games were generally interesting, even if the action didn’t live up to what we saw in round 3. There was only one decisive game, and it was a strange one. Ian Nepomniachtchi blasted out his first 20-some moves against Wesley So, following known theory. He played a novelty on move 22 that didn’t seem to improve on earlier games, and went into a pawn-down ending that should have been drawn with correct play. He had all the time in the world to work out the way to draw, but kept blitzing until he was in trouble. His 36th move was the final straw, met by the smart 37.h4, winning. So’s technique was excellent, and Nepo’s unnecessary but well-deserved loss kicked him out of the first place tie he shared with Alireza Firouzja, and now it’s So who’s in that tie.
That tie, as noted above, is with Firouzja, but it could easily have been with Gukesh Dommaraju, who exploited Firouzja’s time trouble in a complicated Berlin ending to achieve a winning advantage. Firouzja, as always, remained resilient, and when Gukesh also ran short of time he was unable to clear the last hurdle. Firouzja drew, and remains undefeated with a +1 score despite having two lost positions and one near-lost position in his four games.
His negative counterpart is Ding Liren, who has gifted half-points to his opponents rather than stealing them. In this round he had impressively outplayed Fabiano Caruana on the white side of a Ragozin, but just when the time had come to figure out how to convert his large positional advantage into something terrible he played the awful 37.Nf4, after which the game was a dead draw after a couple of fairly obvious moves.
The other two games were short draws, though Anish Giri’s game with Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu gave Pragg a few tense moments. He had missed Giri’s fine 15th move, and he was fortunate to have a way or two to escape from serious trouble. As for the Maxime Vachier-Lagrave vs. Nodirbek Abdusattorov game, that was a non-event after MVL’s strange 8.Bxc6. Maybe he didn’t feel well or was upset about his taking a draw in a winning position against Firouzja the day before. Whatever the case, Abdusattorov achieved one of the easiest draws he’ll ever experience with Black at this level.
To recap the overall standings: Firouzja and So lead with 2.5 points out of 4, Abdusattorov and Giri are in last with 1.5 points, and the other six players are on an even score. Here are today’s games, with my comments. Round 5, played tomorrow/today (Friday), is the last round before the tournament’s one rest day, and has these pairings:
Caruana - Vachier-Lagrave
Praggnanandhaa - So
Nepomniachtchi - Ding
Firouzja - Giri
Abdusattorov - Gukesh