Tal Memorial Blitz, Day 2 (of 3): Carlsen Leads, Anand Second

After 14 more rounds, the Tal Memorial Blitz is 2/3 over. Magnus Carlsen had the hot hand today, going a drawless 11-3, and now lead Anand by a point. Generally speaking, it was a good day for Kramnik, though he lost to both Carlsen and Anand, and an even better day for Karjakin, who is in third place. As for Karpov, he sunk like a stone in the remaining seven rounds of the first cycle, drawing three and losing four. His results in the first seven rounds of the second half have been better - 50%.

So far I've only seen the games of the big three (Carlsen, Anand [but just a handful of his games] and Kramnik), so it's only their games I can refer you to. Carlsen's losses to Ivanchuk and Morozevich were interesting (I'd even call the latter game surreal, while the former was a case of an attack gone bad). Among his wins, his victory over Kramnik is worth a look, and the end of his game with Svidler was seen by many spectators as mysterious - could it be that Svidler (again) resigned in a drawn position? (He did this once in a real tournament against Kramnik, in an opposite-colored bishop ending, which was an ironic complement to his offering Anand a draw when Svidler was winning by force in a pawns vs. knight ending.) In fact Carlsen was winning, in nice style.

Among Kramnik's games, the battle with Mamedyarov was spectacular, while the Naiditsch game showed an attack gone awry (like the Carlsen loss to Ivanchuk mentioned above). Finally, Kramnik's draw against Leko in the final game of the day was perplexing, in that I can't understand what has happened to Leko's oustanding technique. His loss to Carlsen in the real tournament was mind-boggling, considering his abilities, and this was another major lapse. Hopefully it's just a bad run or a little lapse in confidence, and he'll return to his best chess soon.

Leading Standings after 28 of 42 Rounds:

1. Carlsen 21

2. Anand 20

3. Karjakin 18.5

4-5. Kramnik, Svidler 16.5

6-7. Ponomariov, Grischuk 16

Full standings here.

Comments

[Sundar]

What an impressive play so far by Anand who at 40 giving the young blitzeneration run for their money !

[Daniel]

all the games are available on chessgames.com here: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=70133

[Jordan Henderson]

Karpov seems to be playing above his rating, though. I'm too lazy to figure out it all out, but the average rating of this tournament seems way above his 2617 listed. Karpov and Kosteniuk (and Tkachiev) appear to be ratings outliers here by quite a bit.

Kosteniuk doesn't really have anything to be ashamed of, either.

[Andrey]

Carlsen-Svidler video.
There is a couple of other videos in that channel (Anand-Kosteniuk and Karjakin-Morozevich).

P.S. Dennis, is there a particular reason you avoid mentioning that this blitz event has the official status of world championship?

[Dennis Monokroussos]

Just to annoy you? :) It's okay to note that it's a world championship without assuming that I have some motivation for not mentioning it; it turns out the answer is simply that I didn't know! Two years ago it was the blitz world championship and last year it wasn't, and I hadn't seen anything at all about it this time and didn't go out of my way to look. Thanks for the video - it was very nice, and useful too, as it added the remaining moves on to the score I saw during the live relay.

[Thomas]

While it was - obviously - a very strong tournament, actually I wonder if it should have gotten official world championship status: only six players formally qualified (at the Aeroflot blitz), the rest was invited by the organizers. Of course many of them might or would have qualified "in case of need", if only based on their ELOs.