Gibraltar, Round 4: Four Perfect Scores, Plus Topalov's Master Class
Friday, January 30, 2015 at 5:05PM
Dennis Monokroussos in Gibraltar 2015, Hikaru Nakamura, Veselin Topalov, Wei Yi

The ranks of the perfect are dwindling in the Masters section of the Gibraltar Chess Festival, and now there are just four. Hikaru Nakamura leads the way after a powerful victory over Nils Grandelius, Reinier Vazquez [sic] Igarza upset Maxim Rodshtein, Wei Yi defeated his countrywoman Ju Wenjun and Baskaran Adhiban beat former women's world champion Antoaneta Stefanova to complete the quartet. There is plenty of competition in the next score group, half a point back, including Veselin Topalov, Peter Svidler, Yu Yangyi, Pentala Harikrishna, current women's world champion and women's #1 Hou Yifan, and American player Aleksandr Lenderman is there too.

All the top boards can be replayed here, and I'll leave you to replay and analyze them as you see fit. Instead, I'll invite you to have a look at Veselin Topalov's "Master Class", filmed after the round, which sees him presenting a nice and instructive old victory against Alexei Shirov from Linares 2004. Afterwards he took a lot of questions from the audience and from host GM Stuart Conquest as well, so it's an interesting hour all from start to finish. Here it is - enjoy:

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