Chess (#1179)

The London Classic ended with great excitement and somewhat strange results. Magnus Carlsen, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Anish Giri tied for first place with 5.5 points each from nine games. Levon Aronian was fourth with 5. The trio played a lopsided tiebreaker. Carlsen went straight into a final with the best tie-break while MVL beat Giri in a match that needed an Armageddon playoff. Then, Carlsen beat MVL 1.5-0.5 in the finals.

So the world champion clinched victory at London ($75,000) and first place in the Grand Tour (another $75,000). He had a solid performance, winning two of his last three games, against Alexander Grischuk and Hikaru Nakamura. He nearly beat Veselin Topalov, who was saved by the 50-move rule.

Giri was almost as impressive. The Dutchman is the only player to have gone through the Grand Tour undefeated (apart from the tiebreaker). MVL was badly served by the rules. The French GM was third initially on tiebreak and the fact that he beat Giri in their tiebreaker did not count in the final standings.

Michael Adams, Fabiano Caruana, Grischuk all scored 4.5 with Adams and Caruana making nine draws each. The highest negative score came from Nakamura who took eighth place after being in the shared lead because he suffered successive losses to Carlsen and Giri.

The two former world champions, Anand (3.5) and Topalov (2.5) both had terrible tournaments. The inconsistency of these two greats in the past couple of years probably owes something to increasing age. They've both won tournaments against strong fields and they've also had bad results.

Viswanathan Anand drops in rankings from #3 to #8 - his losses to Grischuk and MVL looked avoidable in that he made big oversights. Topalov slips to #9 from #2 - like Anand, Topalov missed relatively simple tricks.

The inconsistency of these two, and of another former champion, Kramnik, has contributed to ranking churn over the past two years. Carlsen has held #1, uninterrupted. But Nakamura, Caruana, Grischuk and Aronian have touched #2, along with Anand, Kramnik and Topalov.

The DIAGRAM, WHITE TO PLAY, (White: Carlsen Vs Black: Nakamura, London 2015). How can white cash in the bishop pair? He played 66.Bxb7! Nd3 [Or 66...Nxf5+ 67.Kxf6 Nd4 68.c6 wins] 67.Kxf6!! Nxf4 68.Ke5 Nfe2 69.f6?! Instead an easy win is [69.c6! Nxf5 70.Kxf5 Nd4+ 71.Ke5+-]

The game continued 69...a5 70.a4 Kf7 71.Bd5+ Kf8? [It seems that 71...Kg6! 72.Be4+ Kf7 73.c6 Nxc6+ 74.Bxc6 Kf8 holds. Carlsen said he could not see a win] But now 72.Ke4! Nc2 73.c6 Nc3+ 74.Ke5 Nxa4 75.Bb3! Nb6 76.Bxc2 a4 77.c7 Kf7 78.Bxa4 (1-0). Terrific technique despite the one error.

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player