2018 Grenke Chess Classic, Round 3; Vitiugov and MVL Lead. Plus a 13-Year-Old Wins the Grenke Chess Open
The higher-rated players had Black today in all five games, and they managed to convert in two of them while going undefeated overall. Fabiano Caruana was winning, then not; then winning, then not...etc. against Georg Meier...and finally won. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won against Hou Yifan when the latter underestimated a simple tactical point. With the win Vachier-Lagrave caught up with Nikita Vitiugov, who drew with Arkadij Naiditsch; both players have 2.5/3.
Fabiano Caruana is half a point behind, as are Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian. Carlsen did his best to get something against bottom seed Matthias Bluebaum, but he played well, didn't get intimidated, and confidently achieved the draw. As for Aronian, he drew with Viswanathan Anand.
Today's games (with comments to the decisive ones) are here - with a bonus (see below). Tomorrow (Tuesday) is a rest day; here are the pairings for round 4, on Wednesday:
- Carlsen (2) - Vachier-Lagrave (2.5)
- Aronian (2) - Hou Yifan (.5)
- Vitiugov (2.5) - Anand (1)
- Caruana (2) - Naiditsch (1)
- Bluebaum (1) - Meier (.5)
The Grenke Chess Open ran concurrently, and in a field with over 50 GMs, four of whom were rated over 2700, the winner was 13-year-old International Master Vincent Keymer, with an enormous, undefeated score of 8/9, including four wins over GMs. (I'm not sure what his TPR was, so if someone else has that info please pass it along in the comments.) In the last round he beat Richard Rapport (2715) in a crazy game I've included in the file above. (I've annotated it in depth for a ChessLecture.com video, so members might look for it there in a couple of weeks.)
A couple of fun facts about the young Mr. Keymer. First, he's apparently working with Peter Leko at the moment, but I don't know how long their partnership has existed. Also, when entering his name into the tags for the post I was surprised to see that he was already there - I wrote about him once before, more than two and a half years ago. So as amazing as his performance was in this event, maybe he has been underperforming for the past 30+ months, since he was 2350 back then and was only 2403 coming into this tournament. Anyway, if he can replicate what he did here, he's going places. (Speaking of which, he's going to at least one place: his victory in the Open qualifies him for next year's Chess Classic.)