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    Entries in Hikaru Nakamura (195)

    Tuesday
    Apr262016

    Caruana, Paikidze Win U.S. Championships

    Fabiano Caruana won the U.S. Championship with a fine score of 8.5/11, bouncing back from a disappointing finish at the Candidates to take first place, $50,000, and to regain the #2 spot in the world ratings. He defeated Akshat Chandra to seal the deal, finishing a full point ahead of Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura, both of whom drew their final round games (against Aleks Lenderman and Ray Robson, respectively). A further boon for Caruana, and for So and Nakamura as well, is that they will play in a blitz event with Garry Kasparov on Thursday and Friday.

    The women's championship finished dramatically. Going into the last round perennial bridesmaid Tatev Abrahamyan led Nazi Paikidze by a half a point, and had an easier pairing to boot. Abrahamyan had the black pieces against Ahritha Eswaran, while Paikidze had Black vs. Irina Krush. And yet...Abrahamyan was crushed by her much younger, much lower-rated opponent, while Paikidze completely outplayed Krush - enough to win the game twice. She was beating her brilliantly and beautifully early on, but missed several wins and lost almost all of her advantage. Nevertheless, Krush's position remained practically difficult, and soon Paikidze was winning again. Given another chance she finished strongly, and she was the deserving victor of the women's crown. Like Caruana, she finished with 8.5 points; Abrahamyan finished second with 8 and Anna Zatonskih took third with 7. Krush finished in a very disappointing 6th place after losing her last two games and scoring only a point and a half in the last five rounds.

    Monday
    Apr252016

    U.S. Championship: Caruana Leads So and Nakamura by Half A Point Going Into the Last Round

    It's not too surprising that the U.S. Championship is a race between the big three - Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, and Wesley So - with Ray Robson (mentioned by Nakamura at the start of the tournament as a potential fourth musketeer) also in the hunt. After 10 rounds, Caruana leads with 7.5 points, half a point in front of So and Nakamura, with Robson another half a point behind. In case of a tie for first, there will be a playoff the next day (Tuesday) to determine the winner. Here are the relevant last round pairings:

    • Akshat Chandra (1.5) - Fabiano Caruana (7.5)
    • Aleks Lenderman (4) - Wesley So (7)
    • Ray Robson (6.5) - Hikaru Nakamura (7) 

    Caruana is certainly a favorite to win the title, both because he's starting out with the lead and also because he's playing the tournament's lowest-rated player and tailender. Still, one can't be too sure: he does have the black pieces, and Chandra did manage to draw with Nakamura earlier in the tournament - with Black.

    In the women's championship, the terrible twosome of Irina Krush and Anna Zatonskih have both been eliminated from the race for first after losing in the penultimate round. (Zatonskih also lost in the antepenultimate round as well, thanks to an outright blunder.) Both losses were to kids: Zatonskih lost to 14-year-old Jennifer Yu, while Krush lost to 12-year-old(!) Carissa Yip, who finished the game in style. (Have a look.)

    The tournament leader is Tatev Abrahamyan, who has been getting closer to winning this event every year. She has 8/10, half a point ahead of Paikidze. Both women will have Black in the last round, but Abrahamyan will be playing one of the lower seeds (Ashrithan Eswaran) while Paikidze will face Krush. Abrahamyan's situation looks even better than Caruana's, but - again - there are no guarantees.

    Finally, returning to the main event, the top three - which is at the moment the big three - qualify for a four-player blitz event running Thursday and Friday. The fourth player? Garry Kasparov.

    Thursday
    Apr142016

    U.S. Championships Start Today!

    At 1 p.m. local time in St. Louis (= 2 p.m. ET) the U.S. Championships get underway in St. Louis. Both the Championship and the Women's event are 12 player round robins finishing April 25 - April 26 in case of a playoff, and don't forget that after the event, on the 28th and 29th, there will be a blitz event that might include the big three (Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, and Wesley So) and definitely includes none other than Garry Kasparov. (I hope for his sake he has been training hard.)

    The Championship is incredibly strong, with three players in the top 10 (the aforementioned Mssrs. Caruana, Nakamura, and So), and the second tier of Gata Kamsky, Alexander Onischuk, Ray Robson, and Sam Shankland isn't exactly chopped liver. On the Women's side, it looks likely to be another battle to the death between Irina Krush and Anna Zatonskih, who between them have won the last 10 women's championships. Krush has won the last four, but they've almost always come down to the wire and Zatonskih is the very slightly higher-rated player.

    Here are the first round pairings for the main event: 

    • Fabiano Caruana (2795) - Varuzhan Akobian (2615)
    • Sam Shankland (2656) - Akshat Chandra (2477)
    • Wesley So (2773) - Gata Kamsky (2678)
    • Hikaru Nakamura (2787) - Aleksandr Lenderman (2618)
    • Alexander Shabalov (2528) - Ray Robson (2663)
    • Alexander Onischuk (2664) - Jeffery Xiong (2618) 

    It's a good time to be a fan of U.S. chess! Tournament predictions? Nakamura is the defending champion, and he and Gata Kamsky have won the last seven between them. So only started playing in the U.S. Championship last year and Caruana is a rookie, so the Nakamura-Kamsky streak isn't as relevant as it would otherwise be. My prediction is that Nakamura will win.

    Tuesday
    Feb162016

    Zurich, Finale: Nakamura Takes First Over Anand on Tiebreak

    It was an exciting three-man race in Zurich, with Hikaru Nakamura, Viswanathan Anand, and Vladimir Kramnik all finishing the tournament undefeated. The first five rounds were "rapid-classical": 40' + 10", and the games counted double: two points for a win, one for a draw, and the usual zero for a loss. This was followed by a blitz round-robin with traditional scoring. Anand started 2-0, but drew his last three rapid games and was caught in round five by Nakamura. Their +2 scores gave them 7/10, good for a one-point lead over Kramnik, who only won one game.

    In the blitz, both Anand and Kramnik went +2 in the first four rounds, while Nakamura only went +1. Going into the last round, therefore, Anand led Nakamura by half a point and Kramnik by a full point, and with Kramnik getting White against Anand in the last round a three-way tie for first was a possibility, provided that Kramnik won and Nakamura drew with Levon Aronian. It didn't happen. Kramnik had White, but Anand was better prepared and equalized with ease, while Aronian was unable to hold a difficult double rook ending against Nakamura.

    So just like last year, Anand and Nakamura finished tied for first. Last year, the tournament was supposed to end at that point, and had it done so they would have been co-champions or Anand would have won on tiebreak. Instead, Anand was cajoled into an Armageddon playoff with Nakamura, which he lost, and Nakamura took the title. This time it was Nakamura who wound up with the better tiebreakers, and while there were some rumors about another last-minute playoff getting set up, Anand was apparently not interested and settled for silver.

    They both finished with 10.5/15, a point ahead of Kramnik. After that there was a yawning abyss of a gap, with Anish Giri and Aronian finishing with 5.5 points apiece and Alexei Shirov coming in last with just 3.5.

    The games (unannotated, alas) are here.

    What's next in super-GM land? The pickings are pretty slim for the next month: there are some leagues and the Aeroflot Open at the start of March, but the next really big tournament is the biggest of them all: the Candidates' tournament starting March 10. Four of the players from Zurich (Nakamura, Anand, Giri and Aronian) will be participating there, but it would be a mistake to draw any serious conclusions based on this event, with the possible exception of Anand's performance. To my mind, this shows that Gibraltar was a one-off, and he will be psychologically ready next month.

    Saturday
    Feb132016

    Zurich Blitz: Blitz Recap and Day 1 Pairings, Plus Gelfand-Morozevich

    The main event in Zurich starts today, Saturday, but before that the organizers had the players compete in a blitz tournament. This was entertaining for the spectators (both those on scene, including Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi[!], and the rest of us watching on the internet), of course, and it had the additional purpose of determining the pairings. Placement determined one's pairing number, and so the top three players will all have an extra game with the white pieces in the main event.

    Hikaru Nakamura won his first three games in this six-player round-robin before Alexei Shirov (barely) pulled out a draw in round 4 and Viswanathan Anand beat him in the final round. Those three finished with plus scores, and thus get the extra white game in the rapid round robin to follow. Nakamura (obviously) finished with 3.5/5, while both Anand and Shirov wound up with 3 (Anand took second on tiebreak). Vladimir Kramnik was next with 2.5, Levon Aronian scored only two points (but defeated Anand in their game), while Anish Giri brought up the rear with a winless 1/5.

    Because it's a rapid event (G/40' + 10"/move), there will be two games per day. (At least for the first two days; on day 3 there will be a rapid game followed by another blitz round-robin. Strange, but entertaining.) Here are the pairings for rounds 1 and 2; round 1 starts at 3 p.m. local time in Zurich (= 9 a.m. ET).

    Round 1:

    • Shirov - Kramnik
    • Nakamura - Giri
    • Anand - Aronian

    Round 2:

    • Kramnik - Aronian
    • Giri - Anand
    • Shirov - Nakamura

    There's an added bonus: Boris Gelfand and Alexander Morozevich will concurrently play a two-game match with the same time control.

    Hopefully the quality of the games will be high; whether it is or not, however, they're sure to be entertaining.

    Thursday
    Feb042016

    Nakamura Wins Gibraltar, Defeating Vachier-Lagrave in a Playoff (Plus a Zurich Preview)

    My fantasy of a 13-way tie for first in Gibraltar didn't come to pass, as Hikaru Nakamura and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won their games against David Anton and Sebastien Maze, respectively, to finish tied for first with 8/10. The result was a playoff, and after four consecutive draws (of which Nakamura had winning positions in two of them, albeit very briefly in the second) it came down to an Armageddon game. Nakamura won the coin toss and took black, and when he neutralized Vachier-Lagrave's pressure (that was convincingly achieved with 35...Kg7) the latter was forced into some serious risks. Nakamura was up to the challenge, and soon he was up the exchange while MVL was forced to trade queens or lose a knight. He chose a third option - resigning - and Nakamura won the event for the second straight year and the third time overall. (He first won in 2008.)

    Tied for third through eighth places with 7.5 points were, in tiebreak order, Etienne Bacrot, S. P. Sethuraman, Pentala Harikrishna, Gawain Jones, Li Chao, and Emil Sutovsky. The women's prize went to Anna Muzychuk with 7 points, which was a fine score for just about anyone. (By comparison, Viswanathan Anand and Nigel Short wound up with 6.5 points, and Anand had to win his last two games to achieve that. Admittedly, his tournament was a disaster, but there were 2700+ players who, like Muzychuk, scored 7/10 and had perfectly respectable performances.)

    Congratulations to the winners and condolences to the losers. I was going to engage in some speculation about what Anand's performance here might mean for the Candidates' tournament next month (the short answer: I'm inclined to think it doesn't mean much), but since he'll be in action about a week from now in Zurich we should look towards that event, which will feature three other candidates as well - Hikaru Nakamura, Levon Aronian, and Anish Giri. They will be joined by Vladimir Kramnik and Alexei Shirov in a "slow rapid" (G/40' + 10") and blitz competition from February 13-15.

    The Zurich organizer, Oleg Skortsov, is hoping that this time control (or something close to it) will become the new classical time control. Speaking for myself, I would like to see more tournaments with rapid time limits, but I don't want to see slower time controls go extinct, either. It isn't a pleasure playing back-to-back six hours games in Swiss system events, but the value of depth shouldn't be scorned. It too has a place in our chess world. But what say you? Please answer both as a chess fan (what do you like watching when you're watching top grandmasters in action?) and as a chess player.

    Wednesday
    Jan132016

    Komodo Defeats Nakamura in an Odds Match

    Ah, those pesky chess engines. Once upon a time they were toys, then good tools for warming up, then equal competitors, and then superior opponents with whom we could at least compete. Now? Fuhgedaboutit. Even the best players have no chance against them--worse, they can't even hold the balance when receiving odds.

    But they do come close - at least the best humans do. Hikaru Nakamura braved a four-game odds match against the latest and greatest engine at the top of the heap, Komodo 9.3, and the match came down to the wire.

    In game 1 Nakamura had White, and Komodo played without the pawn on f7. That game was drawn, as was game 2, in which Komodo took White and started without the pawn on f2. In the third game the odds were a bit heftier: Komodo had White and played without the rook on a1, in return for which Nakamura played without the N@b8 and started with the rook on that square. That game was also drawn.

    Finally, Nakamura received no extra material at the start of the final game, but if the old adage that a pawn is worth three tempi is true he received its equivalent. Playing White, he was given the moves e4, d4, and Nf3 for free, and then started the game from that point with the move. The engine managed to gradually extinguish White's advantage in a sort of King's Indian, and went on to win a very impressive game culminating in a fine ending.

    Nakamura was in the match all the way, and I wouldn't be shocked if he managed to draw or even win a rematch. Will there be any further contests? Let's hope so, and let's hope that humanity can keep up and not let the quantity of the odds grow any bigger (or at least not much bigger).

    The games can be replayed here.

    Tuesday
    Dec082015

    London Chess Classic, Round 4: Four Draws and a Nakamura Win

    Decisive results aren't exactly falling like leaves in autumn, but it's not for want of effort at the London Chess Classic. Magnus Carlsen tried until move 78 to beat Michael Adams, and Veselin Topalov went to move 83 trying to defeat Fabiano Caruana, but the defense held in both cases. Alexander Grischuk and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave "only" went to move 43, but their game was a thriller, with both sides playing very accurately in a game that was complicated from start to finish. For Grischuk it was especially impressive, as he had to wend his way through a difficult position in severe time trouble. The fourth draw was fairly short, between Anish Giri and Levon Aronian, but it had its interesting moments early on before it flickered out.

    The fifth game had a winner - the third win in the tournament. Hikaru Nakamura came into today's game with Viswanathan Anand with a 5-1 score against him in decisive classical games, and now it's 6-1. Nakamura steered the game towards a Catalan sideline, which Anand met with an interesting pawn sacrifice. Black's compensation was at least nearly sufficient, but that and the general complexion of the game changed after Anand's 24...Qa4?!, sidelining the queen. Anand hoped that the queen would prove active here; unfortunately for him, it was anything but. The queen was stuck, and after 30...g6 31.h5 g5 Black's weakened kingside allowed Nakamura to transfer his knight from a3 to f5, resulting in a speedy win. (The games can be replayed here, with my notes to several of them.)

    Nakamura thus joins Giri and Vachier-Lagrave in the lead with a +1 score. Topalov lost to the latter two and remains alone in the cellar, half a point behind Anand and a full point behind the four players who are on 50%. Here are the pairings for round 5:

    • Vachier-Lagrave (2.5) - Giri (2.5)
    • Caruana (2) - Grischuk (2)
    • Anand (1.5) - Topalov (1)
    • Adams (2) - Nakamura (2.5)
    • Aronian (2) - Carlsen (2)

    Saturday
    Nov212015

    Caruana Wins the Showdown in St. Louis, Hou Wins the Undercard

    Slightly old news, yes, but compensation is forthcoming. From Friday the 12th through Monday the 15th of this month the top two players in the U.S., world #5 Hikaru Nakamura and world #6 Fabiano Caruana faced off in a four day, four stage match called The Showdown in St. Louis for a hefty prize fund. ($60k for the winner, $40k for the "loser".)

    Day 1 saw them play a Basque match, i.e. a two-board simul against each other. Those games were played with a classical time control, and while Caruana had good winning chances in both Nakamura managed to hold the draw in each case.

    Day 2 was the best day of the event for Nakamura, who won the Chess960 games (played at a rapid time control) by a 2.5-1.5 score. He lost the first game, won the next two and finished with a draw. All the games in the match were weighted equally, so after two days Nakamura led 3.5-2.5.

    Day 3 was what Jennifer Shahade aptly called "rapid rapid" - game 15'+10" - and in this stage Caruana took over. Nakamura was winning the first game, but by the end was fortunate to draw. Caruana won the second game when Nakamura made an astounding, beginner's error in the opening of game two. The next two games were similar: Nakamura was very close to winning game three, which was eventually drawn, while Caruana won another (relatively) clean game in round 4 to close out the day with a 3-1 lead in the stage and a 5.5-4.5 overall lead.

    Day 4 saw the players go at it in an eight-game blitz match, and while one would normally expect Nakamura to be the favorite it was Caruana who dominated. There were lots of errors, as you'd expect from a blitz match - especially on day four of a tough event - and Caruana won the stage with a 4.5-3.5 victory that included a last-round loss from what had been an equal-to-better position almost throughout. Te final match score was 10-8 in Caruana's favor.

    In the undercard, Parimarjan Negi and Hou Yifan played the same schedule against each other, and Hou Yifan was the dominant victor, winning by an 11-7 score. That's even more impressive, considering she lost both of the Basque games on day 1, but after that she steamrolled Negi, winning the Chess960 3.5-.5 (Negi drew the fourth game), the rapid 3-1 (Negi won game 2), and the blitz 4.5-3.5. Hou earned $30k, Negi $20k.

    The latter match was quite entertaining, and certainly of greater theoretical interest as the players went after each other in one Sicilian after another. However, and possibly unfortunately, I've undertaken to offer comments to all 14 of the orthodox chess games (for one thing, I couldn't find the Chess960 games) in the Caruana-Nakamura contest, and you can replay them all here.

    Monday
    Oct192015

    Upsets at the European Club Cup

    Their teams won their round 2 matches at the European Club Cup even without their help, but it was still a shocking day for Hikaru Nakamura and Anish Giri, as they both lost to "mere" 2550-level grandmasters. Badly, too, especially in Nakamura's case. The American #1 and (now-former) world #2 was convincingly beaten by Yannick Pelletier while Giri was defeated by Vlastimil Babula.

    In fact it was almost a triple defeat for the world's super-elite as Sergey Karjakin was on the ropes against Christian Bauer, and had he lost his team (which included Nakamura) would have drawn against their massively outrated opponents. Fortunately for them, Karjakin continued his alchemy, again turning lead into gold and pulling out a victory.