CHESS #1365

Viswanathan Anand shares the lead with Fabiano Caruana and Ding Liren in the Sinquefield Cup. After five rounds, the three have 3 points each, with one win apiece. There have been only four decisive games so far, with Ian Nepomniachtchi losing once to Anand, and winning against Hikaru Nakamura.

The St Louis time control, with 30 seconds delay per move rather than increment, imposes odd constraints. While it guarantees 30 seconds thinking time per move, it doesn’t give players an opportunity to “bank” a few minutes by playing quickly like under an increment control.

There’s no chance to work through a period of time trouble and revert to “normal” playing tempo. Sometimes we see players with one second, or less, on the clock surviving playing purely on the delay. 

The inability to bank time means more 

errors in deep endgames, when hard calculation requiring more than 30 seconds, is necessary.

Anand could have had two wins and a clear lead, if he had found a problem-like continuation against Wesley So. This hidden possibility would, quite possibly, have been overlooked by everyone in a pre-computer era. Of course, the engines find the idea almost instantly, which meant that social media was full of chess fans following the game live and “wondering” how a world champion could have missed this shot.

The Russian Superfinals has concluded with Olga Girya and Evgeny Tomashevsky winning the Women’s and Open events, respectively. Both events were very tight with Girya tying with Natalia Pogonina with 8/ 11 and winning a play-off in the women’s version. In the Open, six out of the 12 competitors had mathematical chances of winning the event, going into the last round. Tomashevsky managed to edge it, scoring 7/11 ahead of Nikita Vituigov, Maxim Matlakov and Ernesto Inarkiev (all 6.5).

The Diagram, White to Play (White: Anand vs Black: So,  Sinquefield Cup 2019) is the critical position. Anand played 20. Qf3?! h6 21. Bxb4 ? Qxb4! Exploiting the back rank mate to hold on. Play continued 22. Qd5+ Kh8 23. Nf7+ Kh7 24. Rf1 Re1 and it was drawn when white failed to hold onto his obvious edge.

Instead white can play 20. Qf1!! Qxa2 21.  Re1! Rf8 [The obvious try 21. Bxb4 Bxb4 22. Rxb4 Qd2! sees black pick up the Ng5] 22. Qe2! wins since black can’t defend the threats of Qe6/Qh5 due to his offside Kt and Queen. Anand missed 21. Re1 here in his calculations. In the game continuation, instead of bxb4 white can try 21. a3! hg5 22. Qb3!!  with a massive edge. But again Anand didn’t see Qb3. These are ideas that could very likely, be missed by any human player — backward moves and “waiting” sacrifices are difficult to see. Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player