Champions Showdown (Chess960), Day 1

The random-number generator outputted an interesting position for the first day of the big-league Chess960 event in St. Louis, with lively play resulting from ideas like Qxh7/...Qxh2 and b2-b4/...b7-b5, hitting the opponent's c-pawn. Four games were played in each match, and all 20 of the day's games featured the same starting position. First the players tried a pair of rapid games from the starting position (g/30 with a normal 10-second delay, i.e. not Bronstein delay), then a pair of blitz games (g/5 with a normal 5-second delay), with the rapid games counting double.

Here are the scores in each match after day 1:

• Topalov 3.5 - Kasparov 2.5
• Svidler 2.5 - Nakamura 3.5
• So 4.5 - Giri 1.5
• Vachier-Lagrave 4 - Shankland 2
• Dominguez 2.5 - Aronian 3.5

Wednesday and Thursday they'll follow the same format, and on Friday they'll skip the rapids and play eight blitz games instead. Every four games a new Chess960 position is randomly chosen, which means something new tomorrow, something new on Thursday, and then something new both at the start and in the middle of Friday's blitz rounds.

I tried to post the games, but although ChessBase can handle Chess960 games in the program itself, the web app for replaying games can't handle Chess960 castling and so the game scores get messed up. They're not on TWIC (yet?) either, probably for a similar reason, nor on the event site. So I'll send you to Chess24, and especially commend to you the third-round game between Shankland and MVL. Here's the end of it with my annotations, starting with a position after any castling worries can mess up the software.