Wijk aan Zee, Round 8

Carlsen creeping up before the rest day.

(In part because today was a rest day, I took a bit longer to finish the post for round eight. Hopefully the improved quality of the annotations will compensate for the delay.)

Coming into round eight of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Nodirbek Abdusattorov led the event, with his closest pursuers a group of four players (Anish Giri, Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa) a point behind. Not one of them managed to win, even though four of the five had the white pieces and none were paired against each other - all played opponents who were having worse tournaments than they were.

Abdusattorov had White against Levon Aronian in a 4.d3 Berlin, but didn’t get anything from the opening and made a quick draw (31 moves). Giri made an even shorter draw, likewise with White, against the struggling Vincent Keymer, calling it quits 28 moves into a Giuoco Piano.

Caruana also had White, but he did not make a draw, whether short or long, against Magnus Carlsen. Caruana briefly had an edge in an Anti-Marshall that had slipped to equality, and then blundered on move 22. Carlsen had no trouble converting his advantage, and with his second straight win closed to within 1.5 points of the leader with five rounds to go. As for Caruana, might he have been overly tired from his 106-move game the round before? Both he and his opponent in that game, Parham Maghsoodloo, lost in this round, in both cases with blunders, so it’s a possibility.

Back to Abdusattorov’s chase pack. The third member of that group, Wesley So, had a small plus with White against Ding Liren, but a single inaccuracy on move 20 allowed Ding to make a draw.

Finally, there was Praggnanandhaa, the only one in the top five to have the black pieces. His opponent, Richard Rapport, had been winless until this round, but won this game, and pretty convincingly. Pragg’s 19…Nxh5 seemed like a bad idea, both short-term and long-term, and in the end Rapport’s prolonged kingside play bore fruit.

Further down the tournament table, the other two games also saw decisive results, with two hitherto winless players joining Rapport as first-time victors in this round. Jorden Van Foreest won with a nice queenside breakthrough on the white side of a (somewhat offbeat) Classical King’s Indian, and Dommaraju Gukesh won an up and down (more often up than down) battle against Maghsoodloo.

Hopefully the players are all rested up, and ready to go in round 9. Here are the round 8 games, with my annotations, and these are the pairings for tomorrow’s (Tuesday’s) round 9. (Carlsen has a pairing that has “hat trick” written all over it [if only for Carlsen], so Abdusattorov will probably want to push at least a little against the winless Keymer, despite having Black.)

• Maghsoodloo (3.5) - So (5)

• Carlsen (4.5) - Gukesh (2.5)

• Praggnanandhaa (4.5) - Caruana (4.5)

• Erigaisi (3) - Rapport (3.5)

• Aronian (4.5) - Van Foreest (3)

• Keymer (2.5) - Abdusattorov (6)

• Ding (4) - Giri (5)