well he hadn’t planned on it, but playing a bunch of whoever those guys were just to qualify looks like that did not prepare him for this candidates tournament
Well Hikaru did play an Italian today and promptly wheeled out 26 moves of prep playing instantly.
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https://mobile.twitter.com/chesscom/status/1540014109235740673
Yo what is Firouzja doing. Playing an opening he never plays, playing a sideline, and spending all his time to get no advantage with White, then blundering.
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Are Nepo’s and Duda’s first names pronounced the same?
Things are really shaping up for Carlsen-Nepo II
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First non-drawn Petrov between 2 GMs I’ve ever seen. Admittedly, I don’t follow chess that closely.
Obviously I missed that one. You can see how close I follow this stuff.
People just throwing points at Nepo. Rapport on a suicide mission today, Alireza deciding to wander into Nepo’s pet Najdorf and forgetting the line, etc.
That’s the luck of these tournaments, I guess. If that game is played in R1 it’s a draw for sure.
Man this Nakamura - Caruana game is really brutal.
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When I read your post I assumed Fabi was dominating.
Surprised to see it the other way around. However, I couldn’t really appreciate the game. Might need to wait for the agadmator vid. Black actually seemed drawn or better to me for a lot of the time that the engine had White winning.
It was pretty positional, everything looks pretty equal on it’s surface but Fabiano’s light square bishop was really out of the play. I won’t pretend I am good enough to see these things in my own games in real time, but I can understand it after the fact. Hikaru’s recap kept calling it “Fabiano’s dead bishop”, lol.
The agadmator vid is out. It’s like half an hour long as the positions were complicated (which is what I meant by “brutal”). As mosdef said, the central story of the win was quality of light-squared bishops. This was Fabi’s decisive mistake:
You can see that at the moment, both players have bad light-squared bishops. Fabi’s looks impressively placed in White’s territory, but it doesn’t actually do anything. White’s pieces are able to use the dark squares and work around it.
The problem with Fabi’s move is that it allows h5, driving the queen from the defence of the g4 square, which then permits Bg4. From there the bishop is suddenly very good, threatening to get to the soft underbelly of Black’s pawn chains, which have limited mobility, and in fact it wins the d5 pawn only 7 moves later and continues to be a menace on the queenside.
Fabi’s only move was to play h5 himself, then White will trade queens on g5 and play Nc6 rerouting to e5 or b4, White still has a long term plan to play g4 to liberate the bishop, while Fabi’s bishop looks permanently bad. Hikaru said he thought he was better there, but the computer only thinks +0.5. After Fabi’s move the position is probably lost.
Yeah, I just saw the vid. Not surprisingly, the game went way over my head. I didn’t quite understand what you meant by brutal, but after watching the vid it seems like one of the “brutal” parts is that Hikaru kept giving Fabi air when he could have struck a death blow.
he’s done that in the mid game a few times, which everyone will do at least once in this event cause it’s hard but if hikaru didn’t give Nepo air, this tournament would be a lot more interesting right now. Only real chance for that now seemingly is hikaru and fabi win tomorrow.
8 rounds in and the tournament is basically over, jeez
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Yeah, this is a weird dynamic this year. The race for 2nd might actually matter.
One upside to Nepo winning is that in commentary last year a lot of GMs (including Caruana) were really sharp in their criticisms of Nepo’s blunders against Carlsen. There is some satisfaction in seeing Nepo mop the floor with these same guys, let alone the guys that couldn’t even reach the candidates (I’m looking at you Giri).
Interesting that everyone except me is voting yes? Like I don’t necessarily put 100% credence in Carlsen’s statement, but I don’t think he wants to play another match against someone he has already played. He can’t really just show up and play the match, preparing for a WCC match is taxing, you have to be right on top of theory. I just don’t think that sounds like fun to him at all anymore and he has nothing left to prove against Nepo.
I just meant a difficult position for both sides, which is the reason Hikaru kept giving Fabi air, it’s just not easy to work out how to coordinate his pieces.