Jobava Wins 4th, 5th Titled Tuesday Event In One Night

What's an instant cure to a last-place finish at Tata Steel Chess? Turn right around and win the fourth Titled Player Tuesday event on Chess.com -- and thanks to some issues with Chess.com's live chess server, win one more!

Pocketing $1,000 in a few hours can turn a chess player's mood around in a hurry. Baadur Jobava's double victory makes him the early king of the event; he's won three of the five contests.

You could now rightfully call him the blitz king, or at least co-king, of the entire site.

He eclipsed GM Hikaru Nakamura in the process. Nakamura is currently playing in the Gibraltar Chess Festival.

How was all of this possible? Chess.com's normal Titled Player Tuesday event began as planned, but after four of the scheduled nine rounds, the live server ended the tournament due to an unexpected glitch.

Chess.com administrators decided to end the tournament and pay out the top five places in full, then restart and play a whole new seven-round event, also with full prizes.

Jobava won the first sprint with 4/4, then rattled off seven more to sweep the second incarnation, too. Each event netted him $500, the normal first-place money.

Although the tournaments were both abridged, the wins represent the first perfect scores in the event's history.

Can you play interesting and dominating chess? This Georgian GM has mastered the combo.

The culprit seemed to be the growing attention of the fledgling event, which was only  in its fourth month.

Chess.com administrators explained the cause of the failure:  "A random glitch happened that we will protect against next time...[It was] related to the number of observers."

The issue was not completely worked out in the second event, so Chess.com decided to more than double the overall prize fund for next month's tournament.

Instead of the normal $1,000, the purse will be $2,500 for February's event.

That Titled Tuesday Tournament will take place Tuesday, February 24. Note that Titled Player Tuesday will move to the first Tuesday of the month beginning March 3.

Enough about the issues; let's look at the games.

TT 4 (The earlier event):

Unbeknownst to the players, every round mattered even more than usual in the four-round edition. Besides Jobava, GM Dmitry Andreikin (world number 18) joined, trying to win his first TT. Also signing on was the world's youngest grandmaster, Sam Sevian, and TT 2 winner, GM Georg Meier. Overall 67 players joined, with 19 GMs.

Jobava showed famous Chess.com member CM Stepan Osinovsky that a world-class GM playing only one game at a time is a different animal. Both men have played World Champion Magnus Carlsen recently, but Osinovsky actually was the one who got the win. Jobava (LexySexy) only needed 22 moves to restore the proper order to the chess world:

In round two, top-seeded Andreikin showed that when all of your opponent's pawns are on the same color as his bishop, then the knight gets a passport for wherever he'd like to travel.

Instead of Jobava, Meier was gunning to be the first multiple winner of the event. Here he used 101 moves to carefully win a knight ending and avoid all stalemates.

That wasn't even half the effort of this game in the same round, featuring Meier's former Death Match opponent. He played 214 moves, the longest in TT history (maybe this game broke the server!?).

White missed the mating net starting with 91. Rd1 and eventually Ng4. Even more heartbreaking, he missed 109. Nd3+, a simple fork.

Did you enjoy Jobava's profligate openings in Wijk aan Zee? They were nothing compared to round three. Sit back and enjoy moves 3, 4 and 23:

Andreikin and Meier kept up, moving to 3/3 themselves, along with Sevian. Round four turned out to be just enough for Jobava to create some distance. He beat FM Tilicheev Viacheslav in another weird affair.

Meanwhile, Sevian and Meier both lost and Andreikin only managed to draw. This normally would not have had such gravitas, but as round five began the server failed. For the record, six players split the remaining four prizes and each earned $85.00. That list includes Andreikin and Azerbaijani GM Eltaj Safarli.

Chess.com made the ad-hoc decision to pay out all $1,000 for those four rounds, then restart and try it again. Fifteen minutes later, another tournament began, though not without lingering issues (a slightly smaller field of 62 whittled down to 40 by round three, although some withdrew on their own).

TT 5 (The later event):

Jobava kept turning online lemons into checkmates. He survived any server glitches and won all seven games to pass Nakamura, win another $500, and finish with a perfect 11/11 on the night.

Particularly pleasing was his fourth (eighth?!) round double-knight mating net against GM Anthony Wirig of France.

Safarli got his second "cash" of the night, taking shared third with IM Kacper Drozdowski (5.5/7), while IM Lucas Liascovich of Argentina took $250 for clear second (6/7).

Don't forget the big one next month -- $2500 is on the line (more than five places will pay) on February 24.

Then the next $1,000 is up for grabs on March 3 as TT switches to the first Tuesday of the month.