M-Tel R3: all games drawn
The third round in Sofia saw a draw as the result in all three games. Of the six players Topalov must have been most disappointed, as he was very close to a win with White against Dominguez. The 5th M-Tel Masters takes place May 12th to 23rd in a glass pavilion on the square in front of the National Theatre Ivan Vazov in Sofia, Bulgaria. It's a six-player double round-robin with Carlsen, Dominguez, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Topalov and Wang Yue playing. The time control is 90 minutes for 40 moves per player and 60 minutes per player till the end of the game. "Sofia rules" will again be used, so draw offers can be made only through the chief arbiter in the case of a threefold repetition, perpetual check or a theoretically draw position. Round 3
Ivanchuk scored his first half point with Black and quite comfortably, as Carlsen was a bit indecisive today. It seemed that he couldn't find a clear plan in the early middlegame and eventuallly found nothing better than to go for a rook ending that was just slightly better for White, but easy to draw even for an Ivanchuk in bad shape.Wang Yue-Shirov was a strange game where White started with the new plan of moving the h-pawn (where you'd normally consider it before having castled kingside), followed by an original rook manoeuver on Black's part. At the first possible moment Shirov decided to go for an ending that was about equal.The best game of the round was clearly Topalov-Dominguez. We haven't seen Topalov playing the White side of a Najdorf too often in recent years (when you search for the position after 5...a6 in 2007-2009, in 19 of the 22 games he was Black!) and perhaps he should do it more often. He outplayed Dominguez right out of the opening and got a huge advantage, that might well have been winning on move 41. White kept some advantage but with the clock ticking he decided to go for safety first.Game viewer
(Click here for more info on the new 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.[TABLE=717] [TABLE=719]
Quite a number of spectators following the games outside...
...but also watching a reflection of themselves
Ivanchuk getting rid of that nasty 0 in the standings...
...and explaining the game with his well-known hand-gestures
And as the media gather...
...Dominguez proves a tough nut to crack...
...for local hero Topalov
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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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