World Cup: Round 3, Day 1: Many Wins, Few Upsets

There was only one upset of any significance today, and the victim was the last American in the tournament, Gata Kamsky. Wesley So was his conquerer - with Black, no less - and he joins with seven other winners today. Here are the results:

Gelfand - Polgar 1-0

Vachier-Lagrave - Yu Yangyi 1-0

Jobava - Grischuk ½-½

Jakovenko - Areshchenko 1-0

Bologan - Laznicka ½-½

Mamedyarov - Wang Hao 1-0

Sakaev - Vitiugov 0-1

Navara - Karjakin 1-0

Li Chao - Gashimov ½-½

Caruana - Alekseev ½-½

Ponomariov - Motylev 1-0

Bacrot - Wang Yue ½-½

Svidler - Naiditsch ½-½

Tomashevsky - Shirov ½-½

Kamsky - So 0-1

Eljanov - Malakhov ½-½

Rather than describe the games, I've simply commented on all of them - though in a few cases, the "comments" consist in marking the first new move with an "N". Also, the Mamedyarov game was not available when I produced my comments, so I can't help you there. But who else is commenting on all of the games? Have a look, here.

Comments

[Jeffrey "notyetagm" Hall]

Dennis,
Can you please insert NULL MOVES into your variations so that we can play out threatened variations on the Javascript board, as in the winning lines you give at the end of the Jakovenko-Areschshenko game in Round 3.1?

Thanks

[Kajetan Wandowicz]

Dennis,

the answer to the (probably rhetorical anyway) question is, as you know, nobody else -- thanks!

Kajetan

[Thomas]

I guess indeed noone is commenting on all the games - too much work in limited time, and not all of them may be worth commenting in much detail anyway.

Chessvibes has a summary of some games, singling out wins by Gelfand and Vachier-Lagrave ("nice, instructive, model game"). And eventually commentary by GM Shipov will probably be translated into English at the tournament webpage - it is already there for rounds 1 and 2. For the time being, you have to know Russian though - I don't.

[Dennis Monokroussos]

Jeff: If you want to be a GM, then you might want to practice visualizing lines that go three half-moves. Btw, what's with the all-caps?

Kajetan: You're welcome. Seems gratitude, or at least basic expressions of it, are incredibly rare nowadays.