Chess (#1175)

The Euro Teams has seen top-seeded Russia take a grip in both sections. The Russians lead the open with 9 match points from five rounds. Azerbaijan, Ukraine, France and Georgia are all sharing second on 8 points. In the women's section, the Russians still have a perfect score with 10/5.

Magnus Carlen's shocking lack of form has been a talking point. The world champion lost a lovely game to Levon Aronian in Rd III but he also blundered and dumped a point against Yannick Pelletier.

Aronian lost to Michael Adams and to Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (MVL). Baadur Jobava has played a couple of nice games and so has Peter Svidler, who won a critical duel versus Vassily Ivanchuk.

The "Showdown in St Louis" turned into an entertaining double-match. Hou Yifan came from behind to win 11-7 against Parimarjan Negi, after the Indian GM blew several winning positions. Much more surprisingly, Fabiano Caruana convincingly outplayed Hikaru Nakamura at short controls to win by an overall 10-8.

Nakamura is ranked world #1 in blitz with a rating of 2884 whereas Caruana is ranked outside the top 50 with a blitz rating of only 2665. The difference is large enough for blitz expectancy to be 6:2 in favour of Naka. It's less skewed at Rapid but Nakamura is ranked #2 (2842) while Caruana is #3 (2829).

The three-tier matches started with a Basque mini-match where two games are played simultaneously with colours reversed at a classical control. Caruana-Nakamura drew both games. Negi took a 2-0 lead at this stage by winning both games.

Then they played four Fischerrandom (C-960) games. Here Nakamura took the lead, winning 2.5-1.5. Hou did even better, beating Negi 3.5-0.5 to come from behind and take over the lead. In the third stage of four rapid games, Caruana and Hou won, by identical 3-1 scores. The final stage involved eight blitz games. Caruana won by 4.5-3.5 and Hou also won by the same score.

The DIAGRAM, Black to play (White: Carlsen Vs Black: Aronian, European Teams Reykjavik 2015) was the setting for a beautiful sacrificial assault. Aronian played 22...Bc4! 23.Nxd8 Bxf1 24.Qxf1 Rxf2 25.Qg1 Ra2! 26.Rxa2 Bxg1 [If 26.Qf1 Rxa1 wins easily while 26.Bb3 Qxg2+! 27.Qxg2 Rxa1+ 28.Qf1 Rxf1+ 29.Kg2 Rg1+! also wins].

The material will be balanced. But black's queen dominates, given loose white pieces and an exposed king. Now play continued 27.Kxg1 Qc1! 28.Kf2 Qxd1 29.Nxc6 Qb3 30.Rd2 Qxc3 31.Rd6 Qb2+ 32.Ke3 Qa3+ 33.Kf2 Qxa4 34.Nxe5 Qc2+ 35.Kf3 f5 36.Rd3 fxe4+ 37.Kxe4 Qxg2+ and (0-1) in 44 moves.

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player