Grenke, Aeroflot and the Petrovs Memorial: Anand, Karjakin and Wojtaszek Win
All three events came down to the wire and could easily have finished with different winners.
The first event to finish today was the Vladimirs Petrovs Memorial in Jurmala, Latvia. Radoslaw Wojtaszek and Vladimir Malakhov tied for first at 10.5/14, with Wojtaszek winning on tiebreaks, but Vassily Ivanchuk could have been the sole winner. He tied with Chanda Sandipan for 3rd-4th, half a point behind, but he was winning against Chandipan in the last round and miscalculated the attack. It wasn't even difficult, really, but in a quick game, especially at the end of a long tournament, anything can happen.
Here he correctly pseudo-sacrificed the rook with 31.Rxg6+ (31...hxg6?? 32.Qxg6+ Kf8 33.Qg7#), and after 31...Kf7 the simplest win was 32.Rf6+ Ke7 33.Qg7+ Kd8 34.Rd6+, game over. Instead he played 32.Qc7+??, perhaps hallucinating that after 32...Kxg6 33.Qg7+ Kf5 34.Qf6+ that Black would have to walk into 34...Ke4(??) 35.Qf3#. After 34...Kg4 there's neither mate nor even a perpetual, and White resigned several moves later.
The second event to finish was Aeroflot. Alexander Grischuk beat Gata Kamsky 1.5-.5 in one semi-final, while Sergey Karjakin had to work very hard to defeat Ian Nepomniachtchi 2-1 in the other. Karjakin was under pressure in every game, but held draws in the regular games and pulled out the Armageddon game thanks to his doing a better job of maintaining his focus. Nepomniachtchi was pressing, but then was clearly taken aback by Karjakin's 34...Ne5! Black should have been much better, but Karjakin allowed White to regain both his position and his bearings, but then "Nepo" got stunned a second time, by 46...g5. By now he was getting rattled, and both players were getting short of time, so perhaps his third loose moment, 52.f7??, was less surprising. Karjakin picked up the pawn with 52...Qf4+, and this time White wouldn't get a reprieve.
Karjakin was similarly scrappy in the final. In game one he got nothing with White against Grischuk, and had to prove the draw. (It wasn't too tough, but still, he was the one needing to do it.) In game 2 Grischuk had serious winning chances and - unusually for Grischuk - an advantage on the clock. Karjakin escaped again. Finally, in the Armageddon game it was Karjakin who was pushing with White, and after 28...Kh8? 29.Qd3 he was seriously better. Karjakin maintained his advantage on the clock, which combined with a meaningful extra pawn to give him a decisive plus. Nevertheless, it all came down to a time scramble, when Karjakin, trying to run Grischuk out of time while avoiding a perpetual, blundered into a lost position. (It was lost before 54.Qe4+.) Fortunately, and appropriately, given the course of the game and the clock, Grischuk did run out of time, and Karjakin and his two extra seconds won the event. (You can watch the live coverage of today's action here; the final game starts at 10:51:00.)
Finally, the Grenke Chess Classic. Fabiano Caruana had led throughout, but a surprise loss in round 9 combined with Viswanathan Anand's win had them tied coming into the final round. Had they finished tied, there would have been a playoff, but alas, it was not to be.
The shortest game (but not the first to finish, as Mark Crowther noted by email) was Michael Adams - Georg Meier, a draw that saw both players finish the tournament on 50%, and cleared the way for the first-place battle. With White, Arkadij Naiditsch played 3.Bb5+ against Anand's Sicilian and followed the old Kasparov-Rest of the World game from the late 1990s. There Kasparov (and most of his followers) played 14.Nb6+, but Naiditsch tried 14.Nc3 instead. After Anand's 16...Nd5! Black's position was very safe. Anand outplayed Naiditsch to reach a better rook ending - indeed, despite his self-critical remarks after the game it seems he played perfect or at least error-free chess through the key moment at move 33.
Here, unaccountably, Naiditsch played 33.Ke1?, which at best is a waste of a tempo. 33.Ke2 might have drawn, but with an extra tempo for his rook to get back into the action, Anand reached a position that was clearly winning after 38...h2.
White's problem is that he'll eventually lose the a-pawn, and then eventually lose the f-pawn, and after that the elementary tactic ...Ra1 Rxh2 Ra2+ will finish the job.
So Anand won, and to force a playoff Caruana would have to defeat Daniel Fridman. Fridman's choice of the ultra-solid Exchange Variation against the Slav made that seem highly unlikely, but that changed when he blundered a pawn on move 36. Fridman defended resourcefully - 54.f5+ was especially nice - but like the Grim Reaper Caruana made progress. After Fridman's 65.Kd3-e2, the last critical position of the tournament was reached:
Caruana has not one but two winning moves here: 65...f4 and 65...g2 (66.Kf2 f4). Unfortunately, he chose door #3 by playing 65...Ke4??, and after 66.d5! it was revealed that he chose the door without a prize. Fridman held the draw, and Anand won his first classical tournament since something like 2008!
Final Standings:
1. Anand 6.5/10
2. Caruana 6
3-4. Adams, Meier 5
5. Naiditsch 4
6. Fridman 3.5