Aronian Wins Superbet Rapid & Blitz In Playoff
On Sunday Levon Aronian defeated Sergey Karjakin in a playoff to win the Superbet Rapid & Blitz Grand Chess Tour in Bucharest. With his victory, the Armenian grandmaster secured a spot in the London playoffs next month.
Anton Korobov's Cinderella story was brutally disturbed on Sunday. He started with five straight losses and would eventually collect just two points—the same amount Fabiano Caruana got on the last day.
Aronian's 4.5/9 was more than enough to overtake Korobov but just enough to share first place. Karjakin made 6/9, which meant both players ended on 20 points.
With or without the playoff, this result was highly disappointing for Karjakin. The Russian GM needed a clear victory in Bucharest to overtake Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the overall standings and came incredibly close.
As it went, Aronian and Karjakin are now tied for fourth place (behind Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren and Vachier-Lagrave) in the overall GCT standings (below), but since Aronian has one more event, he'll surely take the fourth spot.
Viswanathan Anand came third in Bucharest and is now in sixth place in the Grand Chess Tour. With a good result on home soil in the Tata Steel event later this month in Kolkata, India, he can still make it to London.
It was especially sour for Karjakin because the difference with MVL in the standings is just a third of a GCT point, and in the last round he had spoiled a winning position.
Karjakin's opponent in that game? Korobov. If he wasn't winning the tournament, the Ukrainian could still play spoiler.
With little time on the clock, Korobov agreed to a draw while having a forced mate on the board.
Dramatic finish in Karjakin-Korobov.
— Grand Chess Tour (@GrandChessTour) November 10, 2019
Korobov missed a checkmate with Rh1!! allowing Karjakin to go into playoffs against Aronian #RomaniaGCT pic.twitter.com/Txx6piUnE0
Karjakin scored six solid draws and three wins today, and one of his victims was Aronian. The Armenian GM missed a similar tactic as David Navara did on the same day against Alexander Grischuk:
The loss was Aronian's first of the day after starting 3/3. It got him off-balance, and he would lose two more in his next three games and eventually finish with 50 percent.
The first game in the playoff ended in a draw, and then Aronian won the second to take the Superbet Rapid & Blitz trophy home. Even the tactic in this game featured a double attack by a bishop on a rook and king:
Final remarks from @LevAronian as he accepts his trophy: “If you want to be remembered, you want to be remembered as the guy who came there and won.” pic.twitter.com/IYOvZxLtlw
— Grand Chess Tour (@GrandChessTour) November 10, 2019
Anand was in contention for first place for a while, thanks to his good start: 3/3. Finishing with six draws was just not enough. Here's his fine win from the first round:
The big star of the day was, in fact, Vladislav Artemiev. Like the other wildcard, Le Quang Liem, the other day, Artemiev scored a fantastic, undefeated 7/9.
And like against Le, Anish Giri lost in a ferocious attack to the strongest blitz player of the day (although in this game the Dutchman had outplayed his opponent in the opening and early middlegame):
All games from day 5
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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