Gibraltar, Round 7: Howell Half-Halts Hikaru
Monday, February 2, 2015 at 10:02PM
Dennis Monokroussos in David Howell, Gibraltar 2015, Hikaru Nakamura

Hikaru Nakamura's winning streak in the tournament stopped at six, but he was very close to winning his seventh today and still leads the Gibraltar Masters Open by half a point. David Howell held him to a draw, but only after making a misstep on his way to constructing the Vancura Defense. Nakamura in turn missed his opportunity to exploit Howell's error, which only serves to confirm Siegbert Tarrasch's adage that all rook endings are drawn. (Ironically, though, the Vancura Defense discovered, among other things, that a particular rook ending position Tarrasch claimed was winning for the strong side really wasn't. Chess is hard!)

Howell thus didn't manage to catch up to Nakamura, and neither did Yu Yangyi. He had a serious advantage against Hou Yifan at one point, but Hou defended extremely well to hold. Yu remains half a point behind Nakamura, along with Howell and two new contenders. One is Paraguayan GM Axel Bachmann*, who defeated the strong young German Dennis Wagner, and the other is young American star Daniel Naroditsky, who won with Black against Baskaran Adhiban.

Some fine players are in the group with 5.5 points, including Hou Yifan and Wei Yi (now 2700+ again), and surprisingly Veselin Topalov has only 5 points after scraping out a draw with White against American GM Aleks Lenderman. His fellow American and Giorgi Kacheishvili student Irina Krush is also having a good tournament, with 4.5 points, while John Watson is having an even better tournament: he, like Lenderman, has five points after defeating Gawain Jones!

In round 8 (there are ten rounds overall) Nakamura (6.5) will have White against Yu Yangyi (6), Bachmann (6) will have White against Howell (6), and Naroditsky (6) will have White against Nikita Vitiugov (5.5). While we're at it, a resurgent Peter Svidler (5.5) has White against Hou Yifan (5.5). No easy life for her, with back-to-back black games against 2700s!

The Howell-Nakamura game can be replayed here, with some brief comments on the crucial stage of the endgame.

 

* Alas, Scottish GM Matthew Turner is not playing in this event, so that's one punny pairing that won't be happening here.

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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