London Chess Classic, The Grand Finale: Draw, Draw, Draw, Draw, Draw...Win!
It's becoming nightmarish, but at least we can console ourselves with the fact that five of the six games between Fabiano Caruana and Levon Aronian had a winner, and it wasn't a whitewash either: Caruana won three of those games and won their third-place match. At the top though, between now-former world blitz #1 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and world blitz #3 (but maybe de facto #2) Hikaru Nakamura wins were harder to come by.
Both of their rapid games finished in a draw, and so did the first three blitz games. A playoff was averted, however, as Team Nakamura found an opening wrinkle for the last blitz game, and Vachier-Lagrave was unable to cope with it at the board in the limited time afforded by that format. MVL went wrong, Nakamura won, and took the Grand Chess Tour championship title for 2018 (and a bunch of money with it). Not a bad finish to the year at all, winning this and Chess.com's Speed Chess Championship a week ago, and he can put a capstone on the end of the year at the World Rapid & Blitz Championship in a week or so. It won't be easy of course, not least because Magnus Carlsen will be playing.
The third-place match was MUCH more interesting, partially because of Aronian's free-wheeling style and probably also because the players had less at stake. Amusingly, the most interesting game from one point of view was the draw, as Aronian put Caruana's 10...Rd8!? from game 2 of the world championship match to the test. They followed a correspondence game for 25 and a half moves before something new happened, and Caruana held the draw pretty easily. (I may have found a couple of minor improvements, but Caruana showed that the line was not a one-off bluff.) Caruana won game 2 of the rapid to take a 4-point lead going into the blitz portion of the match, and the remaining games were decisive. (A reminder: the classical scoring - which was irrelevant throughout the competition - was 6-3-0, rapid was 4-2-0, and blitz 2-1-0.)
Caruana's win was a slight surprise, but Aronian was licking his lips at the prospect of beating up on Caruana in blitz. This optimism seemed justified when he won the first two games to level the scores. Those two games were very difficult to win, but he did it, and in game 3 he had White. A crazy and offbeat London sideline opened the game, and Aronian obtained a serious advantage, though not one where the position has resolved and the advantage is easy to convert. Missing 13.Be5, Aronian's advantage shrunk, disappeared, and then turned into a disadvantage, and Caruana played an excellent game on the way to a comeback victory. In a must-win situation with Black in the last game Aronian went for a sideline of the Modern, but wound up with a poor position. Caruana played very well, and although he might have won faster with more precise play he was in control from start to finish and won convincingly.
The win should hearten Caruana and his fans, but I stick to what I said in the previous post: Caruana has to make a priority of improving his rapid & blitz chess. Hopefully he's playing in those championships next week as well.
Tournament website here.
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