Wijk aan Zee, Round 4

Carlsen and Ding both lose; Giri and Abdusattorov lead.

After a fairly sleep third round, the tournament became newsworthy in round 4. Magnus Carlsen lost the very first classical game he played against Anish Giri, and has gone undefeated against him in classical chess since then - twelve years ago to the day! That undefeated streak is over, as Giri beat him rather badly. Carlsen played a sideline - 12…d6 - against a well-known gambit line against the Queen’s Indian, and while Giri may have been somewhat surprised it doesn’t seem that Carlsen was as well-prepared as he should have been, either. Carlsen went astray, and while Giri made one moderately significant mistake afterwards it was almost all one-way traffic, as Giri finished things off in crushing style.

The world’s #2 player didn’t fare any better. Yesterday, in a classic instance of the commentator’s jinx, I said that Ding Liren’s draw against Carlsen showed that his defensive technique was very good, and showed that at least that element of his form was in fine shape. Naturally, today’s action undermined that claim as Praggnanandhaa ground him down from an equal and fairly drawish middlegame. That was very impressive by the youngster, succeeding where even Carlsen didn’t.

There was a third win on the day, for the first time in the tournament, when Nodirbek Abdusattorov’s endless pressure against Parham Maghsoodloo in a queen and rook ending finally bore fruit. Maghsoodloo’s king was always in trouble, and while an engine probably would have held it the task was almost hopeless for a human in the long run, and Black finally buckled. Giri and Abdusattorov are leading the tournament with +3 scores; Praggnanandhaa and Caruana are half a point behind with +1.

The remaining games were drawn, with something weird happening in the Richard Rapport vs. Fabiano Caruana contest. Apparently Rapport offered a draw around move 19 and Caruana accepted, but then realized that draw offers weren’t supposed to be made until (after?) move 30. So they kept playing, but by move 30 Caruana was clearly better. Caruana could have gone for more, but he did the honorable thing and made a draw, creating a repetition.

Wednesday is a free day, and I’ll take a bit of a free day myself by only annotating the Giri-Carlsen game; you can see that and replay the other games, here. Play resumes on Thursday, with these pairings:

• Carlsen (2) - Abdusattorov (3)

• Praggnanandhaa (2.5) - Giri (3)

• Caruana (2.5) - So (2)

• Erigaisi (2) - Ding (2)

• Aronian (2) - Keymer (1.5)

• Maghsoodloo (1.5) - Van Foreest (1.5)

• Gukesh (1) - Rapport (1.5)