Carlsen and Gelfand win in round 7 Bazna
In the seventh round of the Kings Tournament, which has returned to Bazna, Carlsen won against Radjabov. Gelfand is still a point behind the Norwegian after beating Nisipeanu with Black. Games commented by GM Dorian Rogozenco & videos.The fourth Kings Tournament takes place in Medias, Romania from June 14 till 25. Against it's a 6-player, double round-robin, with two rest days. This year Carlsen, Gelfand, Nisipeanu, Ponomariov, Radjabov and Wang Yue play. The rate of play is 2 hours for the first 40 moves, one hour for the next 20 moves and then 15 minutes plus an increment of 30 seconds per move.The rounds start each day at 15.30 which is 14.30 CET and 08.30 EDT. They can run well into the evening, as we won't see ultra-short draws in this tournament - no draw agreement by the players are allowed before move 30, except for cases of a triple-repetition, a perpetual or a theoretically drawn position.The event is organized by Romgaz and the Chess Club Society "Elisabeta Polihroniade”. This year the tournament is officially part of the Grand Slam, substituting the cancelled MTel Masters. Venue is the brand new Romgaz Center in Medias (near Bazna), but the organizers are considering to move back to Hotel Complex Balnear Expro in Bazna, where everyone is staying. ChessVibes will be at the tournament from start to finish, providing videos for the official website:Videos
Source files: (for iPhone users and others)Round 7
Monday morning the tournament organizers decided to move back to Bazna, where the first three editions of tournament were held as well. It was clear that the players weren't really fond of the half an hour drive to Medias and back each day, but the final 'drop'... were the drops of rain that fell on Carlsen and Ponomariov's board in round 6. To avoid any further problems as result of the unpredictable weather, all boards, pieces and other things were moved to the conference room of the hotel complex. The players and seconds were all quite happy about this. One of the reasons might have been that they now have some more football to watch each day!After a somewhat slow start (certainly from hindsight) it's now full steam ahead for Magnus Carlsen, who won his fourth game in a row. His tournament performance rating is now 2960 according to TWIC, 2955 according to Chessbase. (Who is right? Well, it doesn't matter too much.) His live rating is now 2825.
"I thought it was a very good game actually," said a cheerful Carlsen afterwards. The Norwegian pointed out that both he and his opponent Teimour Radjabov had probably played the strongest moves up till the rook ending. "He handled the position very well. I thought I should at least make him work a little bit for the half point," said Carlsen, and after the inaccurate 32...Rc5 Black indeed needed to work hard. Radjabov had gotten into timetrouble and after 39...Kg8 the rook ending was lost. We are using Carlsen's own words when we say that the rest was a 'matter of technique'.Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu was clearly disappointed after his loss against Boris Gelfand, which brought the local hero on minus two. The Romanian was mostly disturbed by the simple tactics he missed in the middlegame. He had planned 21.Rxe4 dxe4 22.Qxe4 but this is refuted by 22...Qxc6.
Ruslan Ponomariov had no reason to be happy either after his draw with Wang Yue. The Ukrainian had been clearly better and a healthy pawn up, but couldn't win the ending. It was surprising that he didn't play the positional standard move 28.h4, and later he simply overlooked 37...Ng6 completely.
Round 7 games commented by GM Dorian Rogozenco
Game viewer by ChessTempo
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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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