Nakamura Grabs Sole Lead At U.S. Chess Championship
It's Hikaru Nakamura alone who is enjoying the lead at the 2019 U.S. championship during the rest day. The 31-year-old grandmaster beat Timur Gareyev and is the only player on 4/6. Jennifer Yu kept her half-point lead in round six.
U.S. Championship:
"It was a strange game, to say the least," said Nakamura about his win vs Gareyev, his second victory of the tournament besides four draws. "I think we were more or less playing on our own from about move three or something!" he said.
This happened because Gareyev was avoiding the Exchange Gruenfeld (Black usually takes on d4 to reach that), but then he started "misplacing his pieces" according to Nakamura. Black should definitely have put up a bigger fight for the e5 square in this game.
Sam Sevian, Wesley So, Leinier Dominguez and Fabiano Caruana are the players trailing Nakamura by half a point. The latter finally finished his streak of 27 games without a win.
"It feels good. It's been a long time!" said Caruana.
It's been 174 days, to be exact, since he beat Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in the U.S.-vs-Azerbaijan match at the Batumi Olympiad.
Caruana's victim was Jeffery Xiong, who had such a great start with 2.5/3 but then only got a draw from his next three games.
"It wasn't perfect, but I think overall I played quite well," said Caruana. That was a fairly accurate statement since all the variations he mentioned in his post-game interview were mostly the first choice of the engine!
Tail-ender Awonder Liang finally got to score his first win as well. One of the youngest grandmasters in the world, the 15-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin didn't shy away from some deep French Winawer theory against Var Akobian.
Liang followed Parimarjan Negi's recommendation 8.Bd3 instead of taking on g7 right away. The players reached a very complicated endgame where White was an exchange up but Black had three central pawns. It remained super difficult until it was basically Akobian's time trouble that decided this game.
Liang at some point just pushed his a-pawn: "My thought process was either I promote the pawn or I lose!" he said.
Round six commentary by GM Robert Hess.
U.S. Women's Championship:
It was a bloody round with three decisive games in the main tournament and five in the women's. IM Anna Zatonskih moved to an excellent 5/6 score with her win against WIM Ashritha Eswaran.
It started off as a classic example of a minority attack in the Exchange Queen's Gambit, with Zatonskih avoiding weaknesses around her king, and in fact avoiding a black attack altogether. Eswaran then defended her weakness on c6 with a move that was tactically flawed.
Amazingly, 5/6 is not enough to be leading the tournament. After dropping her first half-point, FM Jennifer Yu returned to winning, this time as Black vs FM Maggie Feng. It wasn't easy.
"It was a really lucky game. She played really well," said Yu. "It was just crazy."
GM Irina Krush can probably say goodbye this year to the idea of winning her eighth title after losing to WGM Tatev Abrahamyan in a sharp Sicilian Dragon.
"I don't know what was going on!" said Abrahamyan before starting her interview. Those Dragons are always difficult.
The official broadcast of round six.
Previous reports:
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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