Wijk aan Zee, Round 5
Abdusattarov defeats Carlsen, leads with a +3 score while the champ falls to -1.
Maybe Magnus Carlsen felt bad that his withdrawal from the World Championship made it hard for FIDE to find a sponsor for the resulting match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren, and decided to start losing all his games to increase the legitimacy of the Nepo-Ding match and its attractiveness. If so, it worked - I’ll post on that next - and he can start winning games tomorrow. For now, he’s in a hole, following up his loss to Anish Giri in round 4 with a loss to Nodirbek Abdusattorov. Apparently this hasn’t happened to Carlsen in classical chess since 2015.
Give the credit to Abdusattorov, who played an excellent (though not perfect) game. Carlsen got attracted by an interesting (and unnecessary) exchange sacrifice, and while his compensation was initially enough his 18th move left him without active chances. The result would henceforth be only a win by the 18-year-old Abdusattorov or a draw, and after Carlsen’s error on move 43 the youngster showed good form in converting the winning queen ending.
As Giri only drew with Praggnanandhaa, Abdusattorov is now alone in first with an impressive 4-1 score. Giri is in clear second, and another half a point back there’s Pragg, Fabiano Caruana (drew with Wesley So), and Levon Aronian. Aronian had a winning advantage against Vincent Keymer in the middlegame that he failed to convert, but patient grinding in the endgame paid off when Keymer blundered with 65…Be8?, allowing a critical pawn swap with 66.h5.
The day’s other decisive game was Parham Maghsoodloo’s win against Jorden Van Foreest. Maghsoodloo’s 8.a3 was a novelty, and while JVF made his next two moves almost instantly the second of those moves was a lemon. It’s hard to believe he would play so quickly in such a sharp line after a novelty, so he had probably looked at the line but misremembered something. In any case, the refutation involved a piece sacrifice, and Maghsoodloo either found it at the board or successfully recollected and confirmed it, and Black was in deep trouble. Van Foreest upped his game and defended well, and after a couple of slack moves by White he was back in the game. That lasted until his 23rd move, which was another big error, and this time he didn’t manage to recover.
The other two games, Erigaisi-Ding and Gukesh-Rapport, were drawn without many missed opportunities (all four draws were pretty clean). All these games, plus one interesting battle from the Challengers tournament, are here (with my notes to the decisive games). Here are the pairings for round 6:
So (2.5) - Keymer (1.5)
Ding (2.5) - Aronian (3)
Giri (3.5) - Erigaisi (2.5)
Abdusattorov (4) - Praggnanandhaa (3)
Van Foreest (1.5) - Carlsen (2)
Rapport (2) - Maghsoodloo (2.5)
Caruana (3) - Gukesh (1.5)