Carlsen, Nepomniachtchi In Chessable Masters Semifinals
GMs Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi qualified for the Chessable Masters semifinals convincingly. Once again, the two needed just three games to win their matches against GMs Fabiano Caruana and Vladislav Artemiev respectively.
The games of the Chessable Masters can be found here as part of our live events platform. GM Aryan Tari, IM Levy Rozman, WGM Qiyu Zhou, and IM Aleksandr Ostrovskiy are providing daily commentary on Hikaru Nakamura's Twitch channel, embedded on Chess.com/TV.
With both matches starting with a draw, everything was still possible. Then both Carlsen and Nepo won two games in a row, so they reached the semifinals in the fastest possible way.
As quiet as Carlsen's win in game two was, it made a powerful impression. "Magnus is poetry when he's on his game," said commentator GM Yasser Seirawan.
In the third game of the day, Caruana finally got a good position after Carlsen spent almost six minutes on what ended up as a dubious 14th move. The world champion defended well, got Grunfeld-like compensation and eventually equalized. Caruana then suddenly collapsed quickly.
Despite his quick victory against the world number-two in classical chess, Carlsen expressed in the official broadcast that he finds this time control the hardest: "I've sort of always found rapid chess the most difficult because it’s such a tricky hybrid between classical and blitz chess."
The other match saw a similar scenario. After a draw in the first game, Artemiev got a big chance to take the lead when Nepomniachtchi erred in the opening. But just as we see above, the game took a dramatic turn eventually:
Nepomniachtchi's second win (again from a worse position) includes a beautiful move, very similar to Aronson-Tal, Soviet Championship 1957 (included in the annotations). Can you find it?
On Sunday the other side of the bracket is back in action with GM Anish Giri, on his 26th birthday, defending his lead against GM Alexander Grischuk and GM Hikaru Nakamura having to win against GM Ding Liren.
Games QF Day 3
The Chessable Masters runs June 20-July 5 on chess24 as part of the Magnus Carlsen Tour. The prize fund is $150,000 with the first prize of $45,000. The time control is 15 minutes for all moves with a 10-second increment after each move. No draw offers are allowed before move 40.
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