Medias Kings Rd4: Hard fights, but no knockouts

ROMGAZ and the Chess Club Society "Elisabeta Polihroniade” of Bucharest are staging a double round robin tournament with six top GMs: the world's second highest ranked player, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who at the age of 20 has an Elo rating of 2815. Ukrainian GM Vassily Ivanchuk, currently the world's number five, rated 2776; Sergey Karjakin, former child prodigy and youngest GM of all time, now playing for Russia, rated 2776; top US grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, clear winner of this year's Wijk aan Zee tournament; Teimour Radjabov, at 2744 one of Azerbaijan's top GMs, and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, the best Romanian player, currently rated 2659. The competition is taking place from June 11th to 22nd 2011 in Medias, Romania.

Round four results

Commentary by GM Dorian Rogozenco

The fourth round of the Kings' Tournament brought three draws: for the first time there were no decisive games. The reason for it partly became clear at the press conference, where both Karjakin and Radjabov admitted that they are still feeling the tiredness after being in Kazan, where the Candidates matches were played (Radjabov as a player, Karjakin as Kramnik's second).

Today Karjakin achieved nothing against Carlsen's Caro-Kann. Moreover, at some point the Russian had to forget about his initial ambitions and play for a draw in an endgame with a pawn down. He succeeded it thanks to the activity of his pieces.

Teimour Radjabov against Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu implemented the bold Schliemann Gambit – a sharp opening variation, which the Azerbaijani GM plays from time to time. He had no problems to achieve equality with black and could even try to fight for advantage at some point.

Nakamura-Ivanchuk saw the Nimzo-Indian, where the Ukrainian chose a rare variation with Black, allowing Nakamura to achieve a promising position. However, with a timely pawn sac Ivanchuk traded queens and entered a rook endgame which he led very confidently to a draw.

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Schedule and results

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

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