Carlsen in sacrifice mode crushes Fedoseev
Karjakin and Duda draw an uneventful first game Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 – Norwegian World Champion GM Magnus Carlsen (2847) was highly motivated today. Eliminated from the World Cup final in the tiebreaks yesterday afternoon, but still undefeated in classical games – boasting a +5 rating improvement – a win over Russian GM Vladimir Fedoseev (2696) would definitely bring back his edge. His opening choice – the King’s Indian defence – was already a statement: he was going for the kill. Fedoseev didn’t back down at all: his third move 3.h4! clearly put Magnus off-balance. “A very good choice” said Carlsen after the game. Carlsen went into deep thought and after sixteen minutes chose one of the most principal continuations, deviating from a previous Fedoseev game which went 5…Na6. The fight was on. “My ideas today were generally connected with sacrifices” was the Norwegian’s mentality. The key moment of the game came on move sixteen: Vladimir Fedoseev – Magnus Carlsen in a typical King’s Indian middlegame, Carlsen decided to unbalance the position. The fantastic sacrifice idea 16…f4! followed by 17.Bxf4 Bd7 18.Nd1 Rxf4! reminded World Cup commentator GM Nigel Short of some of Tigran Petrosian’s games: the exchange sacrifice was one of his trademark positional gems. Fedoseev accepted the gauntlet and began to defend. However, even an exchange and a pawn up, his position was very hard to play: all his pieces were bottled up on the kingside and Carlsen was dominating the dark squares. The Russian grandmaster tried to give back the exchange but Carlsen kept declining: his bishop was much stronger than the rook. You don’t often see a zugzwang position with so many pieces on the board. Finally, on move forty Carlsen recovered the sacrificed material, at the same time keeping all his positional advantages and Fedoseev gave up his hopeless position immediately. Carsen will play White tomorrow in the second game. A very content World Champion gave us his thoughts in a brief post-game interview. Former 2015 World Cup winner GM Sergey Karjakin (2757), representing Russia, opened the game with 1.d4 and his opponent in the final GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda (2738) from Poland, defended with the Vienna system, which has brought him quite a lot of success in this event. Karjakin followed the steps of a previous game between Magnus Carlsen and Jan-Krzysztof Dua, from the Tata Steel event in 2019, introducing a novelty on move 11.Rd1. Duda didn’t seem very impressed and quickly defended his extra pawn with 11…Bd7. Even though Duda’s move is very logical, it might have caught Karjakin by surprise, because he thought for seventeen minutes before going for a three-fold move repetition. We caught up with him after the game and he was kind enough to explain his thought process. Obviously, Duda was very happy with the outcome of the game: a draw with Black at this level is generally a very positive result, especially taking into account that his opponent had an extra day to prepare for the game. In his post-game interview, he mentioned that he was surprised by his opponent’s opening choice. He will play the second game tomorrow with White. Text: Michael Rahal, FIDE Press Officer press@fide.com Photo: David Llada and Eteri Kublashvili About the tournament: Scheduled to take place from July12th (Round 1) to August 6th (finals), the 2021 FIDE World Cup will gather together in Sochi (Russia) 309 of the world’s best chess players, with 206 of them playing in the Open World Cup (and 103 participants in the first-ever Women’s World Cup. The top two finishers in the tournament, aside from World Champion Magnus Carlsen who is also participating, will qualify for the 2022 Candidates Tournament, in addition to winning the 110.000 USD first prize (80.000 USD for the runner-up). The full tournament tree, live games and PGN files can be found on the World Cup website alongside a great amount of other interesting information such as daily videos, a complete photo collection and other useful data. Organisers: International Chess Federation (FIDE), Chess Federation of Russia, Russian Ministry of Sports, and Government of Krasnodar Krai. Partners: Gazprom – general partner Nornickel – general partner PhosAgro – general partner Chessable – event’s partner Aeroflot – CFR’s partner Educational centre “Sirius”
Van Foreest shocks So but American hits back
Dutch destroyer Jorden Van Foreest came close to felling top seed Wesley So in a start to the knockouts that came full of fire. The 22-year-old threw everything at his American opponent and inflicted a crushing 19-move win over him in Game 2. But it was not enough to take the lead as the super-solid So hit back and then kept Van Foreest at bay in the final game – just – to escape Day 1 with a 2-2 draw. Van Foreest and So will go into battle again with everything resting on a one-match shootout and tiebreaks if necessary. So said afterwards: “It was really a very bad day for me, or maybe Jorden just played really very well.” In the other quarters, Armenia’s Levon Aronian wrestled the advantage from Azerbaijan’s Shakrhiyar Mamedyarov with a classy 2.5-0.5 win with a game to spare. Aronian must now be considered the hot favourite to progress today. Vietnam’s Liem Quang Le won two games to take the first match against 18-year-old hotshot Alireza Firouzja. The youngster will fire back today. Liem said he was better prepared for the Tour after coming into this event “fresh and ready for the fight”. The match between speed demon Hikaru Nakamura and Vladislav Artemiev, the runner-up in the Goldmoney Asian Rapid, ended in four draws. Nakamura had a big chance to get a win in Game 3 but missed it. They resume with everything resting on a simple shootout today. The knockouts continue tomorrow. Kick-off is at 17:00 CEST. All matches in the Chessable Masters are hosted in chess24.com’s playzone and available to watch on the platform’s Twitch and YouTube channels for free. The Chessable Masters is the penultimate leg of the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour before the Finals event in San Francisco, where the ultimate winner will be crowned the world’s best online chess player. For further information, please contact: Leon Watson, PR for Play Magnus Groupleon@chessable.com+44 7786 078 770