Gashimov Memorial: Karjakin, Rapport Lead Before Blitz
GM Sergey Karjakin and GM Richard Rapport are tied for first place after four days of rapid chess at the Vugar Gashimov Memorial in Baku, Azerbaijan. GM Viswanathan Anand is currently in last place, but there are 14 rounds of blitz to play.
You can follow the games of the Vugar Gashimov Memorial here.
The rapid stage of the Vugar Gashimov Memorial is over. Both Karjakin and Rapport won five of their seven mini-matches, lost one outright in the other two games, and another one by losing the armageddon.
Rapport is again playing rather exciting chess, which has something to do with the fact that he refuses to follow opening trends. Let's look at his openings a bit deeper.
As Black, Rapport scored 3.5/5 with the French, using somewhat offbeat Winawer lines. As White, he played fairly normally against the two Sicilians and one Caro-Kann he faced. However, all five times that his opponents played 1...e5, he went 2.Nf3 but then followed up with a King's Indian setup rather than a Spanish or Ruy Lopez (or Scotch, for that matter), also scoring 3.5/5 there.
Here's his win vs. GM Fabiano Caruana where he used that line:
Perhaps Rapport's most attractive game so far is his win as White against GM Rauf Mamedov, a fairly normal Rauzer that saw some nice sacrificial play from the Hungarian GM:
Karjakin needed a few rounds to warm up but has been showing some great fighting chess so far. The following game was a wonderful battle with the 20-year-old local talent GM Vugar Asadli, who has been putting up a decent fight against the super GMs (and even won his match with Anand).
As said, it hasn't been Anand's tournament so far. Here's that game with Asadli that, so far, has determined who is in last place:
The tournament continues on Wednesday with seven rounds of blitz, followed by seven more rounds on Thursday.
Standings after rapid
| # | Fed | Name | Rapid | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Pts |
| 1 | Richard Rapport | 2750 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 16 | ||
| 2 | Sergey Karjakin | 2757 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 16 | ||
| 3 | Fabiano Caruana | 2770 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 14 | ||
| 4 | Shakhriyar Mamedyarov | 2727 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 14 | ||
| 5 | Rauf Mamedov | 2690 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 9 | ||
| 6 | David Navara | 2706 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 8 | ||
| 7 | Vugar Asadli | 2309 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 4 | ||
| 8 | Viswanathan Anand | 2748 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
All games rapid
The Gashimov Memorial started with two-game rapid matches (Dec. 18-21) where the winner gets three points and the loser zero. In case of a tie, an armageddon game decides, and the winner gets two points and the loser one. Then, a double round-robin of blitz follows (Dec. 22-23) where the time control is five minutes plus a three-second increment, and the points system is back to normal.
Previous report:
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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