Nakamura, So Through To Round 2 FIDE Grand Prix Moscow
The American grandmasters Hikaru Nakamura and Wesley So both won their FIDE Grand Prix tiebreaks in the shortest way possible to reach the second round. The new pairings are Nakamura-Dubov, Grischuk–So, Wei Yi–Nepomniachtchi and Svidler–Wojtaszek.
After Saturday's bloody round, only two out of a possible eight tiebreak matches needed to be played on Sunday. And these tiebreaks could theoretically have gone seven games (three pairs of two with decreasing clock time and then an Armageddon), but each went only two.
Hikaru Nakamura was the first to emerge victoriously after beating Teimour Radjabov with the white pieces and then drawing his black game.
Both players played very solidly in the first, a Queen's Gambit, and so it remained almost equal until 32…f6 33.Nh4. Radjabov had forgotten about White's knight sortie, after which it became difficult, especially since he Azerbaijani player was low on time as well.
"Maybe a computer can still hold it but it's very unpleasant," said Nakamura.
"I thought my position was completely fine but then I started to mix things up, lacking some time there. I completely forgot about this Nh4," said Radjabov.
"Obviously winning the first game made the second game a lot easier," said Nakamura. He could have gotten under some pressure if Radjabov had played more precisely on move 22.
Nakamura and Radjabov interviewed after their match. | Video: WorldChess.
In the next round Nakamura will meet the 23-year-old Russian grandmaster Daniil Dubov, who eliminated top seed Anish Giri. Nakamura said he was surprised about Giri feeling the underdog: "It puts you in a very bad mood for the rest of the match."
About being mistaken with his prediction that 80 percent of the matches would go to tiebreaks, Nakamura said: "I think it was just the matchups and who had black in the second game as to why there were so many decisive games, more than the format being brilliant. It was just the matchups, and so far it seems like it's good for chess, but it's very early."
Wesley So knocked out Jan-Krzysztof Duda in an identical scenaro: a win with the white pieces followed by a draw.
Although he noted that both Nakamura and himself had come to Moscow with some useful rapid practice in Abidjan, in the first game So was either not fully sharp, or playing a bit too cautiously as he missed that a Bxh6 sacrifice was just winning.
Duda came back into the game and was doing alright, until he suddenly blundered horribly (calling 35...Bxf2 "a tragical move" based on "an illusion").
Especially the second game was "nerve-wracking" according to So, who was probably lost at some point but managed to trick his opponent with 42...Nc1!, a move that's easy to miss.
"Jan-Krzysztof is very young and he is improving very quickly; no doubt that he will be a top player very shortly," So said about Duda.
Duda and So interviewed after their match. | Video: WorldChess.
So now plays Alexander Grischuk, but he remarked that he didn't really care about his next opponent. "After my very embarrassing play in the first classical game I just wanna prove that I can play chess."
The 2019 FIDE Grand Prix series consists of four knockout tournaments, with 16 players each, who play two classical games per round and if needed a tiebreak on the third day. The other three Grand Prix tournaments are Riga/Jurmala, Latvia (July 11–25), Hamburg, Germany (November 4–18) and Tel Aviv, Israel (December 10–24).
Each of the four tournaments has a prize fund of 130,000 euros ($145,510). Prizes for the overall standings in the series total 280,000 euros ($313,405), making the total prize fund of the series 800,000 euros ($895,444).
The games start each day at 3 p.m. Moscow time, which is 14:00 CEST, 8 a.m. Eastern and 5 a.m. Pacific. You can follow the games here as part of our live portal. The official site is here.
The official WorldChess broadcast with GMs Evgeny Miroshnichenko and Daniil Yuffa.
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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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