CHESS #1407
The Chessable finals at Chess24.com will see Anish Giri versus Magnus Carlsen. Giri beat Ian Nepomniachtchi in one semi-final while Carlsen beat Ding Liren in the other. Earlier, Ding took out Hikaru Nakamura while Carlsen beat Fabiano Caruana, and Giri beat Alexander Grischuk. The Ding-nakamura match went to tiebreaks and so did CarlsenDing after one remarkable act of sportsmanship from Carlsen. Giri won an Armageddon against Grischuk and beat Nepomniachtchi in the last game of their normal match.
Obviously, Carlsen is the favourite. In his match with Ding, Carlsen won the first game from a totally drawn position when Ding was disconnected. He responded by resigning Game 2 on move 4! As he said, he would have felt very foolish if he had promptly lost the next two games, but of course he didn’t. He won in tiebreaks. Ding is a sometime second and good friend of Carlsen, which may have influenced the decision. Anna Ushenina won the first leg of the Women’s Speed Championship. She beat Valentina Gunina in the Finals after beating R Vaishali in the semis. This is a good result for young Vaishali.
Fide has announced that it will postpone the world title match to 2021, which gives it some time to re-organise the Candidates that was truncated unfinished. Arkady Dvorkovich says Fide is committed to completing the Candidates in 2020, preferably in Ekaterinburg itself.
The Olympiad will, however, take place online in late July. Or rather, an online Olympiad will take place with the following format. Each team in the online Olympiad have six players and six reserves in a mixed format with a minimum of three female players and two junior players. Specifically, each team must include at least one player (born in 2000 or later), at least two women and at least one girl born in 2000 or later.
The time control will be 15 minutes + 5 seconds increment per move. The event will consist of two main stages: the “divisions stage”, and the play-offs stage, from round of 16 to the final. The seeding will be established with the final standings of the last “Gaprindashvili Cup”, which combines the results in the open and women’s sections at the Batumi Chess Olympiad 2018.
Solving the Diagram, White to Play (White: Giri Vs Black : Nepomniachtchi, Chessable 2020) involves taking a backwards look. White played 37. d5 Nxg3 38. fxg3 Rxh3 39. Bc3+! Kg6 40. Bxh8 Qxh8 41. dxe6! Rh2+ 42. Kg1 f5 43. Rxe7 Qh3 44. Qe8+ Kf6 45. Rf7+ Ke5 46. Rc5+ Ke4 47. Qc6+ Kxe3 48. Re5+ (1-0). White has to notice that h1 is defended by Qc6.