London Chess Classic: Anand suffers a defeat

All photos by Lennart Ootes

The 9th edition of London Chess Classic is currently underway in Olympia Conference Centre, London. It’s the final leg of the 2017 Grand Chess Tour where Magnus Carlsen is currently leading the standings.

All participants of the London Chess Classic.

Drawfest

The starting three rounds saw draws on all boards—15 in total! Sparking worldwide criticism on chess having a clear problem with ‘draws’.

Meanwhile, the much-awaited third round clash between World Champion Magnus Carlsen and five-time World Champion Viswanathan Anand proved to be a battle of titans.

Anand was better against Carlsen after the Norwegian employed a typical pawn sac in the Catalan opening. A series of slick defensive moves from Indian superstar forced the tour leader to scramble for a draw.

“I think he was the one fighting for an advantage and I don’t really know where things went wrong for me,” said Carlsen after the game.

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The Indian chess wizard surprised Carlsen in the opening. “I think I caught him slightly offguard in this line because I haven’t played it in a while. He tried to catch me offguard with Na3. Neither of us was very familiar and we were mostly working things out at the board.”

GM Fabiano Caruana broke the ‘draw’ jinx with two decisive results against GM Sergey Karjakin and Viswanathan Anand in fourth and fifth round respectively.

Anand played the Berlin against the American GM. Caruana chose a line where White castles queenside and tries to get an attack going, but initially he wasn’t confident. “I felt like I would lose at some point,” Caruana said.

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“Obviously I completely lost the plot because from move 29 to something every move is a blunder, if not actually a blunder then by intent. It just happens,”Anand pointed out.

With two consecutive victories, Caruana took a full point lead over his rivals in the London Chess Classic.

Rank after Round 5

Rk.	SNo		Name	FED	Rtg	Pts.	TB1	TB2
1	3	GM	Caruana Fabiano	USA	2799	3,5	2,0	0,0
2	1	GM	Carlsen Magnus	NOR	2837	2,5	0,0	0,0
	2	GM	Aronian Levon	ARM	2805	2,5	0,0	0,0
	4	GM	Vachier-Lagrave Maxime	FRA	2789	2,5	0,0	0,0
	5	GM	So Wesley	USA	2788	2,5	0,0	0,0
	7	GM	Nakamura Hikaru	USA	2781	2,5	0,0	0,0
	9	GM	Nepomniachtchi Ian	RUS	2729	2,5	0,0	0,0
	10	GM	Adams Michael	ENG	2715	2,5	0,0	0,0
9	6	GM	Anand Viswanathan	IND	2782	2,0	0,0	0,0
	8	GM	Karjakin Sergey	RUS	2760	2,0	0,0	0,0

London Chess Classic FIDE Open

The FIDE Open is running parallelly where 278 players from across the world are competing in the same venue. Twenty-one Indians are taking part in this nine round Swiss event.

IM Nihal Sarin briefly emerged as the joint-leader of the tournament before he succumbed to a loss against GM Melkumyan Hrant of Armenia.

IM CRG Krishna and IM G.A Stany are on 4.5 points respectively.

Round 7 on 2017/12/07 at 1630

Bo.	No.		Name	Rtg	Pts.	Result	Pts.		Name	Rtg	No.
1	9	GM	Melkumyan Hrant	2633	5½		5½	GM	Hawkins Jonathan	2579	12
2	4	GM	Nabaty Tamir	2657	5		5½	GM	Vakhidov Jahongir	2500	25
3	6	GM	Grandelius Nils	2647	5		5	GM	Handke Florian	2526	20
4	21	GM	Kotronias Vasilios	2524	5		5	GM	Maze Sebastien	2614	10
5	13	GM	Moussard Jules	2576	5		5	IM	Nihal Sarin	2507	22
6	28	GM	Hector Jonny	2493	5		5	GM	Donchenko Alexander	2569	14
7	16	GM	Le Roux Jean-Pierre	2560	5		5	WGM	Vo Thi Kim Phung	2380	61
8	35	GM	Williams Simon K	2453	4½		4½	GM	Motylev Alexander	2675	1
9	2	GM	Sargissian Gabriel	2672	4½		4½	IM	Krishna Crg	2421	44
10	11	GM	Cornette Matthieu	2606	4½		4½	IM	Ladron De Guevara Pinto Paolo	2422	43
11	48		Henderson De La Fuente Lance	2419	4½		4½	GM	Mikhalevski Victor	2545	17
12	23	IM	Stany G.A.	2502	4½		4½	IM	Bartholomew John	2448	36
13	49	GM	Arkell Keith C	2416	4½		4½	GM	Fernandez Daniel H	2500	24
14	55	IM	Munguntuul Batkhuyag	2397	4½		4½	IM	Bellaiche Anthony	2499	26
15	31	IM	Hambleton Aman	2474	4½		4½	IM	Martins David Pt	2400	52