World Blitz Championship, Day 1: Vachier-Lagrave Leads With 9.5/11
It was a very exciting first day of the World Blitz Championship, and through ten rounds it was a two-horse race between Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Magnus Carlsen. Both players won their first four games, and then Carlsen was held to a draw by Tigran Petrosian in round 5. MVL won his fifth in a row, but then Carlsen defeated him in their head-to-head match-up in round 6. Carlsen drew in round 7 with Aronian while Vachier-Lagrave won again, so they were tied at 6/7 and kept winning through round 10. Finally, both players experienced a bit of kryptonite in the last round of the day. Carlsen was beaten in good style by Sergey Karjakin, while Vachier-Lagrave was held to a draw by Teimour Radjabov - and he was fortunate not to lose.
There are ten more rounds to be played today (Wednesday), and here are the current standings at the top:
- 1. Vachier-Lagrave 9.5
- 2. Carlsen 9
- 3-4. Karjakin, Dominguez 8.5
- 5-7. Aronian, Radjabov, Kramnik 8
- 9-25. Too many to list, all with 7.5
Reader Comments (1)
11 MEZ (local Berlin time, About 3 hours before start of round 12)
with my now corrected* ELO calculating Excel sheet from yesterday, Carlsen is expected to make a score of 7.8 in the last 10 rounds,
and thus will probably finish with a total score of 16.8 points**. ;)
*since my error did lead to reasonable result I didn't doublecheck the formula
**I assumed he will play the highest ránked players after the first day of the event, without those, he has already played.
And yes, unfortunately he will not be able to score exactly 16.8, since there are no extra fractions of points, for stalmating opponents, forcing them to 3 fold repetitions, ore ending in a 130 move draw, with KBN against K.
The latter was successfully claimed yesterday by Ehsan Ghaem Maghami against GM Sethuraman from India.They both took it in good spirits, with humor, which was a pleasure to wach.