CHESS #1364

The St Louis Grand Chess Tour concluded with Levon Aronian winning with 22/28, ahead of Yu Yangyi, Ding Liren and Maxime Vachier Lagrave (all 21.5). Aronian scored 13 in the nine-round rapids (2 points for a win) and 9 in the 18 Blitz rounds. 

Magnus Carlsen’s (17) form stuttered for the first time in 2019. It was the first time event he failed to win since the World Championship match in Oct-Nov 2018. Carlsen had losses to Ding Liren, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian (Rapids), and to Sergey Karjakin (blitz). 

Carlsen still holds a comfortable lead in overall GCT Standings with three events played, 38 Grand Prix points and $137,000 prize money. MVL has played four events to be in second spot, with 33 GP points, and $90,000. The Sinquefield Cup starts this weekend.  

Baadur Jobava broke a two-year slump to win the Abu Dhabi Masters with 8 points from 9 rounds, and a performance Elo of 2900-plus. Many Indians, including Murali Karthikeyan, Deep Sengupta, Aryan Chopra, Aravindh Chithambaram landed in the top 20. V S Rathanvel, Raahil Mullick, P V Nandhidhaa, Aronyak Ghosh, Nitish Belurkar, K Senthil Maran and M Mahalakshmi all made norms. 

Czech GM Jiri Stocek scored 7.5/9 to win the 2019 Pardubice Open. The Indians playing here scored six norms with WGM norms for Rakshitta Ravi, Shalmali Gagare and Sahajashri C H and IM norms for Dushyant Sharma, Nikhil Dixit and Moksh Doshi. 

Ten Indians will play the World Cup beginning September 10. Viswanathan Anand has decided to give it a miss — he will play the Fide Grand Swiss instead. That follows close on the heels of the WC, and it has one Candidates slot (the WC has two). 

Chessbase has announced the launch of its neural network, Fat Fritz (FF), which is available for analysis on the Chessbase cloud for a small hourly fee. FF was inspired by AlphaZero and runs on high-end commercial hardware. Like “Zero” that is entirely self-taught, FF has played millions of games against itself to develop an understanding. But unlike “Zero”, FF has also been fed games played by others.  

The Diagram, White to Play (White: Vachier Lagrave Vs Black: Rapport, St Louis Rapids GCT 2019) leads into entertaining insanity. White doesn’t want 25. Qxe6 Nxd4 26. cd4 Bd7 27. Qd6+ Bc7 28. Qb4 Bxh3. 

So he played 25.b3 cxb3 26.Qxe6 Nxd4 27.cxd4 Bd7 28.Qxd7?! Nxd7. This speculative sacrifice should not work but it’s rapid with clocks down to a few seconds. Play continued 29.Rxb3 Nb6 30.a4 Nxa4 31.Nxd5 g5 32.f5 g4 33.Bg2 Nb6 34.Ne3 h5 35.f6 h4 36.Kg1 Bc7 37.Rc1 Qd7 38.Rd1 hxg3 39.Bxg3 Rh3 40.Nhf1 Rh5 41.Rc3 Rc8. White’s winning now. 

 The game finished 42.Rdc1 Qxd4 43.Rxc7 Rxc7 44.e6 Rhc5 45.Rxc5 Qxc5 46.e7 Qh5 47.Nf5 Nc8 48.N1e3 Qg6 49.Nd5 Qxf5 50.Bxc7+ (1-0). 
 

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player