No time this week for detailed blogging - sorry - so I'll just offer a quick update on Leuven, the first stop on this year's Grand Chess Tour, and then on TCEC.
Leuven is a combined rapid & blitz event. The first three days are for rapid play, with the ten players engaged in a single round-robin (three rounds per day), and the last two are for a double round-robin in blitz. The rapid games are weighted twice as much as the blitz games, which means that 18 points are available in each discipline, 36 overall.
After two days of rapid, Wesley So is doing great: he has four wins and two draws and leads Levon Aronian, his closest competitor, by two points (by one point on 1-.5-0 scoring, but as noted above the rapid games are weighted double). It isn't just his results that are excellent, but his play has been at a very high level as well.
There have been plenty of exciting games in the event so far (check out Nakamura-MVL from today's round 5 action, for instance), and plenty of blunders too, thanks at least in part to the no-increment time controls. At least in part, but not entirely: one moment that left me incredulous occurred in the Mamedyarov-Karjakin game, also from round 5. I haven't had much time to watch the games, but I clicked to that one when it was in progress right before move 60. A glance was enough to see 60.Rg8+, 61.Rg7+, 62.Rxc7 followed by Ke5-f6, and only a very few seconds to satisfy myself that this was a trivially easy win. I wasn't watching commentators or checking with an engine; it was just the kind of basic, simple, cynical method of simplification all players used to have beaten into their heads from the time they were beginners.
Naturally, Mamedyarov played 60.Rg8+ right away, but then thought for nearly a minute and played 61.Ke5(??). I don't know if the move is winning with best play (I haven't checked with the engines), but if it is it's only with significant difficulty. There were further mistakes in the game, which was drawn after 123 moves, but 61.Ke5 is almost incomprehensible.
Anyway, these are some of the world's best players, so the foregoing isn't meant to be scornful. To err, even to blunder, is human. It's just a very surprising sort of blunder. What makes a blunder surprising? One sort of "normal" blunder is when one makes an automatic move - when one plays "by hand". In positions similar to the one on the board, a certain sort of move is typically good; in this case, however, there's a concrete reason why it's bad. To give a beginner's example: 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6?? illustrates the point: Black's third move develops a piece, helps control the center, and attacks White's prematurely developed queen. They are all virtuous aspects of the move, but the move is a blunder in this particular case because it allows 4.Qxf7#. Another simple but amusing case: the correspondence player who replied to 1.d4 with 1...g6, and included an "if-move": "If any, then 2...Bg7." Of course his opponent replied with 2.Bh6! Bg7 3.Bxg7, and won; this also happens in online bullet games from time to time when 1...g6 players pre-move 2...Bg7.
Now, grandmasters won't walk into scholar's mate or lose a bishop and a rook the way the correspondence player did, but their blunders can follow the same template. Their automatic moves and natural reactions will be very sophisticated, but even they can be led astray by their unchecked intuition. When they are, they commit "normal" blunders.
The abnormal blunder occurs when one ignores the move one's hand wants to make, the obvious move that one's chess experience and education cries out to be played. A line I sometimes use when annotating games or looking at a game with a student is "sometimes, obvious moves are good moves". Keep it simple! If the obvious move wins, play the obvious move! As there was no danger in making the rook trade, and absolutely no difficulty in working out that it wins, and it would be extremely surprising if the idea escaped Mamedyarov's attention, this is a bizarre blunder. Even if 61.Ke5 wins, it's not winning in an especially quick and beautiful way, even if Karjakin cooperates. Weird - but if all of us get to learn from Mamedyarov's error, their game could prove more instructive and valuable to us than a dozen masterpieces.
Standings After 6 Rounds:
Good thing I didn't pick Caruana to win this event! Wait, what's that? I did? In that case, just wait and see: he still has 21 games left to make his incredible comeback.