Meltwater Champions Chess Tour Finishes: Carlsen Still the Winner

A little joke for in the title, with an implicit nod to a very old SNL gag. As it was already known two rounds ago that Magnus Carlsen had won the tournament, it isn't exactly news, but what else is one to say at the end of the event?

One thing that can be said is that after losing his matches in rounds 7 and 8, he finished with a bang, defeating Wesley So 2.5-.5. Overall, it wasn't an especially smooth performance, but even so it was good enough to win with relative comfort (thanks to the headstart from the preliminary events).

For So, who started the event in second, also with a comfortable margin over his closest pursuer, it was a very poor tournament. He won two matches in the rapid portion, in rounds 1 and 3, won two matches in the blitz playoff (in rounds 5 and 8), and lost one match in the blitz playoff (in round 4). The other four matches were lost in rapid, and as a result he not only failed to catch up to Carlsen, he failed to maintain second - or even third place. (Only Anish Giri and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov had a worse tournament, if one excludes the headstart.)

Teimour Radjabov had already passed So in round 8, and with his 2.5-.5 win over Maxime Vachier-Lagrave he finished the event with an exclamation point, winning his last six matches without needing a single blitz playoff. Had there not been any headstarts and everything else remained the same, he would have won the tournament going away.

Levon Aronian also won his final match, against Mamedyarov, with a 2.5-.5 score, and leapfrogged So into third place. That was where he started the event, and while he was passed by Radjabov he in turn surpassed So.

Hikaru Nakamura started and ended the day in fifth, defeating Jan-Krzysztof Duda 3-1. Black won the first three games of the match, and in the last game Nakamura took a trip to the landfill, excavating 1.e4 e6 2.Qh5 out of the sewage. Of course White was worse in the opening and into the middlegame, but that isn't really why people play 2.Qh5, is it? It's tempting to say that this is just showing off or the chess equivalent of extending a certain digit at one's opponent, but let's give Nakamura the benefit of the doubt and assume the primary motivation was a genuine chess idea.

Here's a guess: Nakamura went for a King's Indian Attack setup, and because after Black played ...Nf6 White retreated the queen to e2 we might wonder why this isn't just a loss of time. In fact, it IS a loss of time, but perhaps Nakamura thinks that Black would and should go for a different setup - one not involving ...Nf6 - in case White plays the King's Indian Attack against the French in the usual way; that is, with 1.e4 e6 2.d3 d5 3.Nd2 etc. It's true that 3...Nf6 is the main move here, but there are other setups, like 3...c5 4.Ngf3 Nc6 5.g3 Bd6 6.Bg2 Nge7. Another point is that White must commit to Nd2 in the usual move order, while in the game White delayed the development of his knight for a long time, and when it finally moved it went to a3.

The point isn't that 2.Qh5 against the French is either tricky or good - it's neither - but it forces Black to solve some fresh problems, and at a shorter time control that can be difficult, especially against a player as fast as Nakamura.

Finally, in the battle for sixth, Vladislav Artemiev won game 4 after three draws to defeat Giri.

Here are the final standings. The overall score is given first, with the pure tournament score (out of a possible 27 points) given in parentheses:

1. Carlsen 31.5 (15)
2. Radjabov 27 (21)
3. Aronian 24 (16)
4. So 23.5 (11)
5. Nakamura 21 (17)
6. Artemiev 17.5 (14)
7. Giri 14.5 (9)
8. Vachier-Lagrave 13.5 (11)
9. Duda 12 (12)
10. Mamedyarov 9.5 (9)

Tournament website here. The next big event is the U.S. Championship (play starts Wednesday) and has all the top Americans in action except for Nakamura and Aronian (whose transfer from the Armenian federation is not yet complete). The Russian Championship starts a couple of days later, but with many of their best players not participating that event is far less interesting than it could and should be. (Ian Nepomniachtchi won't be participating, for good and obvious reasons, but neither are Alexander Grischuk, Sergey Karjakin, Daniil Dubov, Evgeny Tomashevsky, Vladislav Artemiev, and Peter Svidler.)