Magnus Carlsen Invitational: Prelims End, Final Four Starts Today (Friday)
Today's matches were more or less meaningless, and the matches reflected this to some extent - especially Carlsen's. He played four openings against Ding Liren that can be at best be called whimsical, and Ding's 3-1 win reflected this. (Carlsen disputes this, noting that none of the losses could be chalked up to the opening. I disagree, and here's why. Catching up from bad positions takes time and energy, and it's very difficult to maintain that level of intensity. Almost as soon as he achieved decent positions in the third and fourth games, he collapsed.)
The other three matches were comparatively normal. Ian Nepomniachtchi defeated Alireza Firouzja in an Armageddon game in a match with five decisive games out of five. Hikaru Nakamura lost the opener to Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, but came back and won the Armageddon game. (MVL faltering in clutch games seems to be a pattern, not a coincidence. Hopefully if he fails to win the Candidates, whenver it's resumed, it won't be in this way.) Finally, Anish Giri finished a weird event by defeating Fabiano Caruana, going 2.5/3 before losing the meaningless finale. Giri lost five matches, "only" defeating Caruana and Carlsen. That's quite the consolation prize!
The games are here; I've only annotated the Ding vs. Carlsen games. (A man's gotta sleep sometime.) Here's what we have to look forward to in the final four: Nakamura-Caruana takes place today/tomorrow/Friday, and then Carlsen and Ding will have their rematch on Saturday, with the final on Sunday.
Reader Comments (2)
Thanks for analyzing, Mr. Monokroussos! I enjoyed the crankiness about Carlsen's openings :)
[DM: You're welcome! I have to vent some spleen every now and then, a bit like Old Faithful's spewing hot water every 90 minutes. (Hopefully my eruptions are far less frequent.)]
Carlsen's play was whimsical indeed - 5.Qe2 in the KG confirms my hypothesis that Keres' (I mean, if you drop Fischer's name you could have mentioned Keres too) recommendations in Open Gambits usually should be neglected.
2.f4 might deserve a question mark, but proving it as Black is much harder than forcing a draw (which here includes reaching a stale equal position). An example is 3.Nf3 d6 4.d4 g5 5.Nc3 idea 6.g3, which is well tested in corr. chess. Btw Fischer was wrong about the strength of ...g4 and ...f3. It allows White to develop the queen's wing without any problem.
[DM: I'm a huge fan of Keres, the player and the analyst, but I wouldn't trust anyone's opening analysis from the pre-computer era. Keres in his best days was a 2600 player (mayyyyyyybe at his best a low 2700 player by today's standards, though that's probably a little too generous), but even so, how is one going to compete with analysis by 3800-rated machines? I wasn't endorsing 3...d6 because of Fischer's analysis, btw; I was just dropping his name because it is generally associated with the move.
One last comment. You write that "2.f4 might deserve a question mark, but proving it as Black is much harder than forcing a draw". I wouldn't say that White is losing after 2.f4, and if he's not then in the highest sense it doesn't deserve a question mark. But Black has a plus score in the database after 2...exf4 3.Nf3 g5, so while theory is always marching as people dig deeper (with the help of more and more monstrously strong engines and computer hardware), both engine evaluations and practice suggest that 2.f4 deserves at least a '?!' sign, no? (Unless you believe you've got specific analysis that overturns this judgment, which you should of course keep to yourself so you can punish unsuspecting victims.)]