Wijk aan Zee, Round 1
Ding and Abdusattorov win, but Warmerdam's win in the Challengers is the one to see.
Round 1 of the Tata Steel Masters (i.e. the top group of the annual tournament in Wijk aan Zee) wasn’t a barn-burner, but it wasn’t terrible. There were two decisive games and two other games that probably should have been decisive. (Oddly, in all four cases it was Black who won or should have won.) If you’re looking for something spectacular, you’ll want to have a look at the game Max Warmerdam vs. Jergus Pechac from the Challengers event, a concurrent tournament whose winner qualifies for the top group in next year’s tournament. You can see that game, and all the top group games, with my notes, here.
Now for the summary of the day’s action. Magnus Carlsen obtained an advantage on the white side of a Catalan against Levon Aronian, but good defense by Aronian allowed him to pull out a draw.
The second seed (and world championship finalist) Ding Liren did win, however, defeating Dommaraju Gukesh with the black pieces. There were a couple of hiccups along the way, but overall it was an impressive game by Ding, who outplayed his opponent in a Queen’s Indian.
In the game between the third and fourth seeds, Fabiano Caruana was White against Anish Giri, yet found himself worse coming out of the opening. Giri was consistently outplaying his opponent and on his way to victory until 24…Bf6?; 24…a4 instead would have left Caruana in deep trouble.
Wesley So had an easy hold with Black against Jorden Van Foreest; indeed, whatever small winning chances there were belonged to him, but it wasn’t too hard for Van Foreest to make the draw.
The impotent opening play for White continued in Richard Rapport vs. Nodirbek Abdusattorov. After clearing the cobwebs, Rapport trotted out the Vienna, which used to be popular when…okay, it was never popular. But it’s not bad, and if the aim is to achieve interesting and relatively fresh positions, Rapport succeeded. On the assumption that he’s the better player, it’s a good approach; unfortunately for Rapport, he wasn’t the better player today. Abdusattorov outplayed him, and while Rapport could have made a draw in the rook ending, it wasn’t easy. Score one for Abdusattorov.
Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi played a very clean game on their way to a draw. As they are countrymen and (afaik) friends I wondered if it was prearranged, but as they used most of their time it looks like a display of mutual excellence and nothing more.
Finally, Parham Maghsoodloo played a sort of reversed Benoni with White against Vincent Keymer and quickly found himself in a practically lost position. Fortunately for Maghsoodloo, Keymer missed a nice tactical idea that solved all of White’s problems, and the game was quickly drawn.
As for the Warmerdam game in the B-group, you’ll see. Enjoy!
Here are the pairing for round 2:
Abdusattorov (1) - Caruana (.5)
Ding Liren (1) - Maghsoodloo (.5)
Keymer (.5) - Carlsen (.5)
So (.5) - Erigaisi (.5)
Aronian (.5) - Praggnanandhaa (.5)
Giri (.5) - Gukesh (0)
Van Foreest (.5) - Rapport (0)
Hi,
I've been enjoying your email list this far, so thanks for that.
But I'm writing to say one thing: Please don't put results right in the subject line of your email! If it wasn't in the subject, I would have already known not to click on the email until after watching.
As you know there hasn't been much chess these last couple weeks, and Tata is the biggest classical tournament of the year.
I'm not getting up at 4am (or whatever time PST) and sometimes due to time constraints, I might even fall a couple days behind (I'll avoid chess news until I'm caught up), and I'm always watching replays on Youtube.
I was literally just this moment going to look for coverage on Youtube, and I still will watch it, but now I already know the 2 big winners.