Sinquefield Round 3: Players Still Stuck In Neutral
Getting 5.5% return on your money will satiate most long-term investors, but not many chess fans. After day three of the 2019 Sinquefield Cup, a field that now includes the top 10 players in the world are all choosing a conservative portfolio. Again all games ended drawn, leaving Viswanathan Anand in the lead.
Only one game in the first 18 clashes has produced a winner, and even that only came at the hands of a last-minute slip by Ian Nepomniachtchi. Contrast with the 2019 Grand Chess Tour event in Croatia, the only other classical tournament on the tour, and Nepo already had three wins all by himself after the same 72 hours of play.
The tournament's unfulfilling nature can be best summarized in round three's longest game. Hikaru Nakamura pushed and pushed with white against Sergey Karjakin but after 104 moves, the American couldn't find a breakthrough against the "Minister of Defense."
The two players even approached the 50-move rule at one point:
Nakamura said he was more frustrated after the game than normal, specifically for closing things with c5. He said White's position looks "overwhelming" but that Karjakin found some precise moves to defend.
"When you see this stuff during the game, then it's much worse," he said about spotting a mistake before a game's conclusion.
Most online chess engines were evaluating Nakamura as significantly better for most of the ending, but this was a fallacy based on White's useless space advantage.
Speaking of computers, and their lack of understanding for closed positions, let's all harken back to 2003. Before you go thinking that this type of pawn structure is inherently drawn, recall that it was good enough to make a pretty tough chess computer look feeble back then:
Perhaps the tussle with the best chance to produce a winner was the exciting middlegame between Ding Liren and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. It was the Frenchman who ended Ding's 100-game unbeaten streak last year on the Chinese player's home turf, but today there would be no revenge.
You can hardly fault the world number two for effort. In trying to notch only his second career classical win against MVL, he forwent castling, threw his h-pawn forward, and momentarily offered a piece. None of that was enough as Vachier-Lagrave traded queens to quell the pressure, and the ending was dead equal.
More draws came from Levon Aronian versus tournament leader Viswanathan Anand and from Magnus Carlsen against Fabiano Caruana. In addition, Wesley So agreed to peace with Anish Giri.
Curiously, it was Nepomniachtchi who could have again shaken things up, and had a better chance to get his own tournament back to par against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov. "Passed pawns must be pushed" is a well-known chess axiom, and applied directly to his game today.
A more incisive rule of thumb was once offered by GM Miron Sher at a chess lesson this author once attended many years ago. The former coach of Caruana claimed that advancing a passed pawn that is on the fifth rank or farther will be the correct move about 20 percent of the time.
Here's another position Sher can add to his teaching. Although the win is far from forced, at least White could keep the passer and the pressure:
One last note about the above game: MVL went into the confessional booth and stated that he once played the same opening 10 years ago against GM Vladislav Tkachiev. He said the game is a "reminder of how young I used to be."
"If everyone is fresh and not making any mistakes, it's just hard to get anything in classical chess," was Nakamura's take. Here's the second day in a row with six handshakes.
Here's the pairings for round four. Nakamura has never lost to Ding Liren.
Round three coverage:
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Mike Klein began playing chess at the age of four in Charlotte, NC. In 1986, he lost to Josh Waitzkin at the National Championship featured in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." A year later, Mike became the youngest member of the very first All-America Chess Team, and was on the team a total of eight times. In 1988, he won the K-3 National Championship, and eventually became North Carolina's youngest-ever master. In 1996, he won clear first for under-2250 players in the top section of the World Open. Mike has taught chess full-time for a dozen years in New York City and Charlotte, with his students and teams winning many national championships. He now works at Chess.com as a Senior Journalist and at ChessKid.com as the Chief Chess Officer. In 2012, 2015, and 2018, he was awarded Chess Journalist of the Year by the Chess Journalists of America. He has also previously won other awards from the CJA such as Best Tournament Report, and also several writing awards for mainstream newspapers. His chess writing and personal travels have now brought him to more than 85 countries.
