St. Louis Rapid & Blitz, Day 4 (Day 1 of the Blitz)
I've been a busy bee on the blog the last week or so, but annotating today's 45 blitz games isn't going to happen, sorry. Here's a more general overview of what happened, beginning with a reminder of where things stood after the rapid. Hikaru Nakamura and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov shared the lead with 12 points apiece, a point clear of Fabiano Caruana. Sergey Karjakin, Levon Aronian, and Leinier Dominguez each had 9 points; while Wesley So and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave had just 8 points to their credit. After that, Viswanathan Anand and Alexander Grischuk brought up the rear with 6 points each.
As always in a blitz tournament, there were plenty of blunders, reversals, and time trouble horrors. Two notable ones: Grischuk blundered against Caruana, allowing the latter to win with 49...Nc3. Caruana moved the knight there in time, but then saw 50.Rd6, with the idea of Rg6, and started calculating it. It took him several seconds to do so, and by the time he finally settled on the move and let go his flag fell before he could hit the clock. Another farce was the last round game between Karjakin and So, a dead drawn rook ending that could have been agreed drawn at least 15 moves before the end. For no obvious reason, Karjakin kept playing, and in a position with at least two obvious decent moves he managed to lose on time.
And there were blunders too, none more significant than the one at the end of the Nakamura-Mamedyarov game. Mamedyarov led Nakamura by half a point at that moment, and having outplayed him looked to increase his lead by a point. Having played a terrific game through 36 moves, he uncorked the unfortunate 37...e4??, losing on the spot to 38.Qxd3.
There were lots of interesting moves and games too, and I'll direct your attention to So-Grischuk; in particular to So's fantastic 26th and 27th moves. The subsequent play wasn't perfect, but his idea was terrific.
As for the race: Mamedyarov and Nakamura had a surprisingly hard time of it, each player only managing a plus-one score on the day. Nakamura lost two games and Mamedyarov even lost three; nevertheless, they maintained their lead and even extended it by half a point, as Caruana only managed an even score. (He did win his last two games though, which would have been three in a row were it not for the failure against Grischuk noted above.)
Aronian had a good day, also going +1 - and it was +2 until he lost in the last round to Grischuk. And speaking of Grischuk, he did even better, going +2, only losing to Anand. But the star of the round was Vachier-Lagrave, who went from near the bottom of the table to fourth overall, just half a point behind Caruana and two points behind the leaders. He scored a fantastic 7/9, producing a 2994 TPR (based on classical ratings, which are lower than the players' blitz ratings). He defeated Mamedyarov, Caruana, Anand, Karjakin, and Dominguez, going undefeated on the day. He's right back in the hunt. Finally, a player who looked like he would make a run was Karjakin, who won his first two games. Unfortunately for him, he went winless the rest of the round while losing four games to fall out of contention.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) the tournament concludes with a second blitz round-robin, with the players reversing the colors from today's action. Here are the current standings:
1-2. Nakamura, Mamedyarov 17/27
3. Caruana 15.5
4. Vachier-Lagrave 15
5. Aronian 14
6. Karjakin 12.5
7. Dominguez 12
8. Grischuk 11.5
9. So 11
10. Anand 9.5
Chess is tough - remember that less than a year ago Anand won the World Rapid Championship and took third in the World Blitz Championship! As for the games, you can replay and/or download the lot of them here (but sans annotations).