2018 Candidates, Round 1: Three Wins! **UPDATED**
No warm-up round today! Three of the four games finished with a winner, and it should have been four out of four. Interestingly, all three of the wins came in the "collusion pairings": one Russian beat another Russian, an American beat another American, and one very good friend beat another. Only in the game with "unrelated" opponents was there a draw.
The first win was quick and painful, as Fabiano Caruana won with a kingside attack against Wesley So. The game was initially a rather dry-looking Closed Catalan, but after 15...e5 it livened up. A key moment came on move 18, when So chose 18...Bxc5 rather than 18...Nxc5. In case of the knight capture, White would have a small, persistent edge, but nothing dramatic. After 18...Bxc5 White had no advantage, but Black had no margin for error. Had So played 23...Ra2 and about a dozen only-moves after that, he'd have achieved equality. (Assuming my analysis is correct.) Instead, he played 23...Ba6, and after that he was losing. White's pieces broke through to Black's king, while most of Black's forces were stuck on spectator duty on the queenside.
Levon Aronian's game finished quickly, especially in the number of moves (22), but with the wrong result. Aronian's 8.h4 was an interesting near-novelty in the Mikenas Variation of the English, and Ding Liren didn't find the best answer to White's idea. Despite missing opportunities on moves 12 and 15 to obtain a winning advantage, Ding was also unable to perfectly navigate the crazy middlegame they created. After 18...Rd6? (instead of 18...Ba8) Aronian was winning, but needed to play 19.Rb2. Or 21.Rb2. Or...well, he didn't get the chance to play 23.Rb2, because the players repeated the position. A big missed opportunity by Aronian.
The day's next winner was Vladimir Kramnik, who gradually outplayed Alexander Grischuk in a...hmm. 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.b3 is what? Eventually it turned into a sort of English, one in which Black was just fine. This remained the case until around move 21, when Grischuk started making inaccuracies. Kramnik's play wasn't perfect, but he kept an advantage and the pressure on, and by the time the players made the time control White had a winning advantage. Kramnik showed good technique the rest of the way, and shares the lead.
Finally, Sergey Karjakin and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov played a long game that went almost six and a half hours, and in the end the world's #2 came away with a win, with Black, over the winner of the last Candidates event. Mamedyarov played a dubious line of the Ruy, but Karjakin's unenterprising 12.Bxd4 let Black off the hook. 14.Qxc7 was a further inaccuracy, but Karjakin still managed to reach a drawish queen & rook ending. Mamedyarov had a passed c-pawn, with all the remaining pawns on the kingside, so what winning chances existed were on Black's side. Nevertheless, the position was equal, and normally Karjakin would hold the draw without too much trouble. Unfortunately for Karjakin, his plan of 26.Ra5 followed by 27.Qc8+ and 28.Qg4 was a sort of extended blunder; he must have missed 28...Rb5, forcing a trade of rooks and leaving him with a much worse, possibly lost queen ending. The play was back and forth, as you'll see in the notes, but in the end Karjakin made the last mistake and was ground down in 71 moves.
The games, with my notes, are here; here are tomorrow's pairings:
- Grischuk (0) - So (0)
- Ding Liren (.5) - Caruana (1)
- Mamedyarov (1) - Aronian (.5)
- Kramnik (1) - Karjakin (0)
Aronian and Karjakin will have to show some resilience after their unforced errors cost them each half a point, especially playing Black against confident opponents who won in round 1.
**UPDATE**
I watched the post-game press conferences on World Chess's Facebook page, and have incorporated players' comments into a revised analysis file, which you can access here. Also of note is that most of the players complained about the noise in the playing hall, which was pretty severe. Even worse: Mamedyarov reported that at one point he could see Judit Polgar's analysis of his game on a monitor from his seat at the board!! (I guess there was a monitor that would allow the spectators and players to see the game positions, and somehow the commentary feed suddenly showed up instead.) Karjakin also complained about the hotel, so it looks like the organizers haven't exactly covered themselves in glory so far.
Reader Comments (1)
Yes, big miss by Aronian. Plenty of games to go still.
Was anyone watching the FIDE coverage? Was it any good? Website is dreadful. Half the links don't work and the word BETA appears on the top left. Not something the fills one with confidence.
[DM: I watched on chess24, but just now watched the post-game press conferences on World Chess's Facebook page.]