Sinquefield Cup, Round 5
Five (interesting) draws going into the rest day.
It was the first winless round of the 2025 Sinquefield Cup - divine punishment, perhaps, for the first Giuoco Piano of the tournament - but to be fair the games were pretty interesting. Two of the games could plausibly have finished with one player or the other winning, and in one of the games both players missed such opportunities.
The shortest game was the most entertaining. Alireza Firouzja went for a two-pawn sac against Levon Aronian in a sharp French. That had been played before, but his 13th move was a novelty. To say that it had never appeared in any prior games (at least none that have made it into one of the databases to which I have access) is not to say that anything we saw in that game wasn’t prepared in advance by both players. Neither player used much time at all, and a very lively battle finished in a perpetual check on move 25.
Going only one more move, but taking far longer in terms of clock time, was the draw between Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Praggnanandhaa. My attention was transfixed by the black knight on c4, which was both dominated and dominating. The desire to eliminate it - but not allow another Black piece onto the square - helped generate the repetition that ended that contest.
Another game that, like Firouzja-Aronian, seemed to be settled largely at home, was Fabiano Caruana vs. Wesley So. In a Reti-turned-English-turned Taimanov Sicilian sideline So sacrificed a pawn with Black to reach a late middlegame with opposite-colored bishops, and while Black had no compensation for the pawn (in the sense of having something that would give him winning chances of his own) his light-squared control allowed him to draw pretty comfortably. The game continued into the second time control, but the real battle finished long before then.
Now we get to the games that could very easily have finished with a winner. With Black in a relatively unconventional Queen’s Gambit Declined World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju quickly obtained a slight advantage and then, after Jan-Krzysztof Duda’s 13.Nxe4?, a winning one. Unfortunately for the champ his 17th move was a big error letting White back into the game, and after further inaccuracies by both sides Gukesh’s 23rd and 24th moves gave Duda the chance to win. He needed to spot some subtle tactics on move 27 to cash in but didn’t, and from there both players navigated the complications more or less perfectly on the way to a draw. There were quite a few errors, but that was a function of how wild the game was and not an indication of poor form on their part. It was a great battle.
Finally, while it would be an overstatement to say that Sam Sevian missed a win against Nodirbek Abdusattorov, it is true that he was convincingly outplayed him and would have enjoyed a meaningful advantage after 33.Rd2. After 33.exd6 Black was able to escape to a drawn ending. White’s position looked slightly prettier, but there was no way to convert the “optical advantage” into something real.
The games, with my notes, are here.
Today (Saturday) is a rest day, and play resumes tomorrow with these pairings:
Abdusattorov (1) - Vachier-Lagrave (2.5)
Gukesh (2.5) - Firouzja (2.5)
Praggnannadhaa (3) - Duda (2)
Sevian (2.5) - Caruana (3.5)
Aronian (3) - So (2.5)