Draw, draw, draw in Dortmund
The third round of the Sparkassen Chess Meeting in Dortmund saw three short draws in the games Carlsen-Kramnik, Naiditsch-Leko and Bacrot-Jakovenko. Carlsen already started repeating at move 15, but keeps his slim lead in the standings.The Sparkassen Chess Meeting takes place July 2-12 in Dortmund, Germany. Carlsen (2772), Jakovenko (2760), Kramnik (2759), Leko (2756), Bacrot (2721) and Naiditsch (2697) play a double round-robin.Round 3
The draw is part of the game. In a six-player tournament this means that, with just three boards, there will always be one or two rounds without much excitement. Saturday was one of those days.Perhaps caught by surprise, in a rare line of the Nimzo-Indian, Carlsen decided to take no risks and went for a repetition of moves at a very early stage against Kramnik. Not long after that, Bacrot and Jakovenko also shook hands; a topical variation of the Berlin Ruy Lopez had yielded White no advantage.Naiditsch-Leko was the game that came closest to a real fight. It started with the Panov Attack, a rare choice these days against the Caro-Kann. White's c-pawn had a nice career, ending up on d7 in the early middlegame, but the fun was soon over and also in this game suddenly everything was swapped.Thus far Dortmund has been somewhat disappointing, especially compared to e.g. Sofia and Bazna this year. Perhaps there are too many of the solid, quiet, positional type of players in one tournament this time? Let's hope that they will prove us wrong by creating some fire on the boards in the next rounds.Game viewer
Click on the pairings at the top of the board to reveal a drop down list of all the games. Click on the arrow under the board just once, then the arrow keys of your keyboard also work. Silverlight works on all browsers and platforms except for Linux, but this should be fixed soon. Contact us for questions, not in the comments section, please.[TABLE=764] [TABLE=767]
Links
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.”
Peter's first book The Chess Revolution is out now!
Company Contact and News Accreditation:
Email: peter@chess.com FOR SUPPORT PLEASE USE chess.com/support!
Phone: 1 (800) 318-2827
Address: 877 E 1200 S #970397, Orem, UT 84097
