Tata Steel, Round 3

Abdusattorov and Praggnanandhaa lead with 2.5/3.

Round 3 of the Tata Steel Masters was fairly quiet, with only two wins in the seven games. Moreover, it doesn’t seem that any of the draws occurred after one player or the other missed out on some big chance; this happened repeatedly in the first two rounds. To my mind, the most surprising draw took place in the battle of the headliners: World Champion Gukesh Dommaraju and top seed Fabiano Caruana. Gukesh had the better position but allowed Caruana to draw by repetition in just 24 moves. Considering how hard Gukesh worked and how many crazy risks he took against Ding Liren in their titled match, it’s shocking to see him give up so easily against Caruana. (Too much respect for Caruana? Too little respect for Ding?)

On to the two decisive games. Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu defeated his countryman Arjun Erigaisi (who is now tied for last place with just half a point from his three games), taking advantage of Black’s split queenside pawns. Erigaisi wasn’t automatically lost by any means, but it’s hard to play perfect defense forever, and he didn’t. Nodirbek Abdusattorov took advantage of Max Warmerdam’s failure to justify his repeated pawn sacrifices/”sacrifices”. Abdusattorov’s play was far from perfect, but he was more tactically alert than his opponent.

Not the greatest round ever, but not a disaster. The games, with my notes to the three games mentioned above, are here; here are the pairings for round 4:

Erigaisi (.5) - Fedoseev (1.5)

Caruana (2) - Giri (1)

Sarana (1.5) - Gukesh (2)

Keymer (2) - Van Foreest (1)

Abdusattorov (2.5) - Wei Yi (1.5)

Harikrishna (1.5) - Warmerdam (1)

Praggnanandhaa (2.5) - Mendonca (.5)