White Presses, Black Holds: All Draws In Prague
GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov and GM Parham Maghsoodloo continue to lead the Prague Masters after four rounds as all games on Friday ended in draws. Day five starts on Saturday at 9 a.m. ET / 15:00 CET / 7:30 p.m. IST.
Prague Masters | Round 4 Results
Calling it a snoozefest would be too much, but after all the wonderful chess and dramatic moments on the first three days, the fourth day of play in Prague missed the same intrigue. Still, the serious chess student will also find interesting moments in today's games.
Local hero GM David Navara recovered well from his missed win the other day against Abdusattorov, and played a good game with the white pieces where he kept co-leader Maghsoodloo under pressure from start to finish.
The 38-year-old Czech GM had prepared quite deeply and was surprised that his opponent copied a game from 2022 that he played against GM Dmitry Andreikin on Chess.com. Surprised, because Andreikin was better in that game.
Not fully expecting to see this line appear on the board again, Navara missed a chance on move 16 to play the middlegame with queens on the board, but also in the endgame he kept an edge. Maghsoodloo, however, didn't have a bad day either, defended well, and so a draw was justified.
GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu stopped the bleeding with a solid draw against GM Thai Dai Van Nguyen, where very little happened to report on. Abdusattorov's edge against GM Gukesh Dommaraju was a bit bigger and the Uzbek GM tried for quite a bit, but his opponent didn't budge.
There was one moment where White played a knight to f5 and then back to d4, which looked a bit curious until you see the nasty tactic Black had in the position:
Also in GM Richard Rapport vs. GM Vincent Keymer, the longest game of the day, White was pressing without getting anywhere in the endgame. It was more or less the same story for GM Vidit Gujrathi vs. GM Mateusz Bartel, with White having an edge for most of the game, and Black defending properly and preventing it getting any bigger:
On Saturday we'll have the fifth round, before a rest day on Sunday. Let's hope for a bit more action!
Prague Masters | Round 4 Standings
Prague Challengers | Round 4 Results
On a day with little action on all five boards of the Masters, we chose to pick a game from the Challengers instead to be analyzed by GM Rafael Leitao. It's the game between Israeli grandmaster Maxim Rodshtein and one of the Czech participants, 14-year-old IM Vaclav Finek, which became a heroic, 6.5-hour fight that also ended in a draw.
We've seen the endgame rook + bishop vs. rook countless times, and you might even have heard of the 'second-rank defense' and all, but what if we add a rook for both sides? That's what we had in this game (before a true RB vs. R appeared after all):
Prague Challengers | Round 4 Standings
The 2024 Prague Chess Festival takes place February 27-March 7 at the Don Giovanni Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic. The format is a single round-robin. The time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 30 more minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment per move starting on move one.
The live broadcast hosted by IM Sagar Shah and Amruta Mokal.
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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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