After five of 11 rounds at the Grand Prix tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk, Fabiano Caruana continues to lead with a +2 score. On paper he had a good chance to move to +3 with the white pieces against the tournament's lowest-rated player, Baadur Jobava, but on the board he didn't come particularly close. Jobava played provocatively in an Advance Caro-Kann, but when Caruana didn't manage to achieve anything more than to go for a meaningless extra pawn in a rook ending the game finished in a draw.
The shortest draw of the round was between Alexander Grischuk and Boris Gelfand. Grischuk remarked after the game that after his 8.h3 the game was basically a draw, and it seems that this was at most a slight exaggeration. (Few of us would have drawn the game, so we can say that there is some exaggeration in his remark.) Gelfand's idea with 17...a6 18.Qb6 d5 was a nice way of getting the job done, and the game finished in a draw by repetition ten moves later.
Hikaru Nakamura vs. Peter Svidler was also a short draw in terms of moves - just 31 of them - but this was a roller coaster ride. Nakamura had a serious advantage out of the opening, and it seems that Svidler may have been in some trouble after 24.Qd2 rather than 24.Rh4. After that inaccuracy, Svidler was okay and by the end was even better, though it wasn't clear to him how to make progress. So, a draw.
The final draw of the day was between Anish Giri and Leinier Dominguez. Giri eschewed the super-sharp system with h4 against Dominguez's Bogo-Indian, and wound up with a worse position for his troubles. Dominguez was better throughout, just not better enough to turn it into a win.
That leaves the day's two wins. The first was Dmitry Jakovenko's win over tailender Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and was mostly due to a single move: 16...Bxh6, blundering a pawn to the simple zwischenzug 17.Nxe5. Before that White was only slightly better, and after it he was just winning. Vachier-Lagrave put up a game fight, and then at the end committed another blunder and resigned after White's reply. The problem with MVL's 39...Kf5? is that after 40.Ra5! White threatens not only 41.Rxc6 but also 41.b5, and either would be fatal. Black could try 40...Rc2, but that's immediately and obviously handled by 41.Rc5.
The other win was a monster game going 99 moves and taking seven hours. Sergey Karjakin didn't have much of an advantage against Evgeny Tomashevsky - maybe nothing, really - but he did have the two bishops. After seemingly endless maneuvering Karjakin played the super-delayed King's Gambit: 70.e4 followed by 71.f4. This didn't win on the spot, but it was very dangerous for Black, whose forces weren't ideally coordinated at that moment for the position to open up. Tomashevsky was also somewhat short of time, and Karjakin was winning a few moves later. It was an impressive game, and a reminder of the wisdom behind the adage "the future belongs to the bishops".
Jakovenko's win brought him back to 50% while Karjakin's win put him in the tie for second at +1, half a point behind Caruana. Tomashevsky has dropped to -1, and he'll need to start picking up the extra half-points rather than giving them away if he hopes to qualify for the Candidates. He can start tomorrow, when the pairings for round 6 are as follows:
- Gelfand (2.5) - Dominguez (3)
- Svidler (3) - Giri (2)
- Tomashevsy (2) - Nakamura (2.5)
- Vachier-Lagrave (1.5) - Karjakin (3)
- Jobava (2) - Jakovenko (2.5)
- Grischuk (2.5) - Caruana (3.5)