R9: Aronian is going to win this one
After he beat Morozevich 2-0 today, Aronian is almost sure of winning Amber 2008. Carlsen lost 1?Ǭ?-?Ǭ? to Kramnik, and Anand also went down, against Ivanchuk.Morozevich seems to have lost his blindfold touch. Yesterday he was in big trouble against Gelfand and today he completely lost track against Aronian in the ending. White should have played 32.exd4 of course. In the rapid game Moro was doing OK but Aronian had needed much less time on the clock and this proved decisive at a later stage.In the blindfold game, Kramnik played 18.Bxb6 "to have some fun". Indeed it made the game quite interesting and Carlsen was defending very well, but then he lost on time because he was mistaken about a certain move he wanted to enter, and then he was a split second too late to enter another one. Too bad, because Black was slightly better in the final position. In the rapid game it was Kramnik with a slight advantage in an ending, but Magnus kept on defending accurately.Anand seems to have lost his appetite for chess a little. With White he got no advantage against Ivanchuk's Pirc, and with Black he really wasn't himself, playing the strange 17...Bg4? losing a pawn for nothing.Mamedyarov needs to get used to Amber some more. Against Loek he missed different moves and was slowly outplayed in the ending. But it was nice that he went for the Budapest Gambit again (and again, quite successfully). Gelfand-Topalov were equally matched today and fought an interesting 1-1. The same with Karjakin-Leko, although the Hungarian threw away a big advantage in the rapid game.Morozevich now shares his lead in the blindfold section with Aronian and Kramnik. Aronian leads the rapid two points clear (an impressive 7/9) and the combined even two and a half points clear (12.5/18) of Kramnik, Leko and Carlsen, who are all on 10/18.
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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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