SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz, Days 1 & 2
The World Champion looks like the world champion.
The chess world marches on from one super-tournament to the next, and already on Wednesday the latest big event got started. The SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz in Zagreb, Croatia has had its first two days, and at the moment Gukesh Dommaraju, the World Champion, leads with 5/6 (or rather, I assume, 10/12; the standard scoring in these rapid & blitz tournaments is to count the rapid games double).
He started with a loss to Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who is also having a great event so far (undefeated and in clear second, with a second win against Anish Giri), but since then he has gone 5-0. In round 2 he beat Alireza Firouzja, then Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu (probably the player of the year thus far), Nodirbek Abdusattorov, Fabiano Caruana, and in round 6 he toppled World #1 Magnus Carlsen. Not bad for a couple of days’ work, to put it mildly.
That’s his second straight win over Carlsen - we all recall the victory from Norway Chess where the former champ slammed the table afterwards - and while he was in some trouble at one point in this game, too, he just outplayed Carlsen in the middlegame. It was extremely impressive, and critical to the standings - had Carlsen won they’d have been tied for first with Duda.
The final three rapid games will be played tomorrow/today (Friday), and then Saturday and Sunday will see the same players contest a double round-robin in blitz.
Here are the games from the first two days (without annotations for now; hopefully I’ll be able to present some highlights at the end of the tournament).