U.S. Championship, Round 8: Shankland Misses a Big Chance

Sam Shankland remains tied with Fabiano Caruana for first place in the U.S. Championship, but he had a wonderful chance to take the sole lead with three rounds to go. With Black against Hikaru Nakamura's 1.b3 he obtained a winning advantage. Even an out of form Nakamura is an extremely tricky defender, and despite having several opportunities to maintain a winning or at least a clear advantage it slowly slipped away.

In the meantime, Caruana achieved a comfortable draw with Wesley So in yet another Petroff, this one featuring Morozevich's old weapon 5.Bd3. It had its heyday a decade or more ago; this time around Caruana came out of the opening in good shape and drew with ease. Caruana remains tied for first, and So remains on the leaders' heels, half a point behind.

The Petroff fared even better in the game between Awonder Liang and Aleks Lenderman, though it would be wrong to say that Lenderman won because he played the Petroff. Liang was slowly outplayed in the late middlegame, and then made some serious errors - blunders, really - in the lead-up to the time control. Down a piece for nothing after move 40, Liang resigned. Kudos to Lenderman for winning his second straight game and closing to within a point of the leaders.

The day's other decisive game went a bit longer: 144 moves. Ray Robson ground down Varuzhan Akobian, who has now lost three games in a row. In this one he could have claimed a draw by three-time repetition at one point, but seemed unsure about the claim and made his move, whereupon Robson avoided the repetition and never allowed another three-time opportunity the rest of the way.

Here are the two games involving the leaders (with some annotations to Nakamura-Shankland). And here are the pairings for round 9:

• Caruana (5.5) - Nakamura (3.5)
• Shankland (5.5) - Zherebukh (4)
• Akobian (3.5) - So (5)
• Lenderman (4.5) - Robson (3.5)
• Izoria (4) - Onischuk (2.5)
• Xiong (3.5) - Liang (3)