Kings' Tournament R6: Karjakin joins Carlsen in the lead

After a rest day dedicated to indoor football, on Friday the King's Tournament in Medias, Romania resumed. The fight between Nakamura and Carlsen, an uneventful Breyer Ruy Lopez, ended in a move repetition at move 34. Radjabov-Ivanchuk was a Semi-Tarrasch that was always about equal. Nisipeanu tried the 3...f5 Ruy Lopez against Karjakin, who came up with an interesting novelty at move 15 and eventually won a rook ending after six hours of play.

General info

The Kings Tournament takes place June 11-21 at the Natural Gas Documentation and Information Centre in Medias, Romania. Magnus Carlsen, Vassily Ivanchuk, Sergey Karjakin, Hikaru Nakamura, Teimour Radjabov and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu play a double round-robin with one rest day after five rounds. The rate of play is 2 hours for 40 moves, then 1 hour for 20 moves and then 15 minutes to finish the game, with a 30-second increment after move 60. No draws are allowed before move 30. Games start 15.30 local time (14.30 CET).

Report round 6 by by GM Dorian Rogozenco

The rest day is over, the players returned to the chess boards in Medias to start the second half of the Kings’ Tournament. Nakamura-Carlsen was the first game to finish with a draw after the repetition of moves. Nakamura’s attempt to surprise Carlsen in Ruy Lopez with the move 11.c4 didn’t really pay off, as the Norwegian quickly achieved a comfortable equality. It looked like Black can fight for advantage, but at the press conference Carlsen recognized that he didn’t feel very well before the game and therefore he went for simplifications and forced the draw by repetition.



The second game to finish was Radjabov-Ivanchuk. The Ukrainian played the Semi-Tarrasch of the Queen’s Gambit declined, which caught the Azerbaijani Grandmaster somewhat unprepared. Radjabov declared at the beginning of the tournament that he can still feel the tiredness after the Candidate matches in Kazan, therefore in today’s game when faced with a situation to take a critical decision, he decided to avoid risks. White accepted a quiet endgame, which looked somewhat more pleasant for Black, but which in the end Radjabov held to a draw without visible efforts.



The longest encounter of the 6th round was at the same time the only decisive game of the day. In Karjakin-Nisipeanu the Romanian played the Schliemann Gambit, which seems to become a popular opening in Kings’ Tournament. On move 15 Karjakin prepared a novelty, which put pressure on Black. After a long thought Nisipenu sacrificed two pawns for activity of his pieces. He quickly won back one pawn, but never recovered the second one.



Black’s position was always very close to draw and at some moments Nisipeanu even missed more or less clear ways to escape. However, being under constant pressure and in time trouble Nisipeanu was forced to give up in the end. A hard-fought win for Sergey Karjakin, who together with Magnus Carlsen shares the 1-2 places with 4 points out of 6 games.

Games round 6 - notes by GM Dorian Rogozenco

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Videos

 

Kings Tournament 2011 | Schedule & results Kings Tournament 2011 | Round 6 standings

Indoor football

On the rest day the now traditional indoor soccer match was organized. Like last year, a team of players would play against a team of organizers. However, the team of players was a bit small: only Carlsen and Ivanchuk played. The latter was joined by his second Sarunas Sulskis, and there were Karjakin's second Alexander Motylev , chief arbiter Faik Gasanov and the first fifteen minutes Chessbase's Pascal Simon, who scored an early goal before heading to the airport. I (PD) made the excellent choice of joining this team - we won by a big margin. I also scored only one goal, but Magnus and especially Sacha many more!

The traditional group photo!

Click on the last photo to enlarge

Photos © Ionut Anisca

Link

• Official website
• Games in PGN via TWIC