Candidates Rd6: Spoilt opportunities

The FIDE Candidates Tournament is taking place in Khanty-Mansiysk (Russia). The first round will start on Thursday, March 13 at 3 p.m. local time, the final round is on Sunday, March 30, 2014. The event is a double round robin (14 rounds). The time control is 120 minutes for the first 40 moves, 60 minutes for the next 20 and 15 minutes for the rest of the game plus an additional 30 seconds per move starting from move 61. The tournament will determine the challenger who will face the reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a title match later this year. The prize fund is 600,000 Euros (= US $832,000), the first place 135,000 and last (8th) place 25,000 Euros.

Aronian casually strolls by a couple of grandmasters
playing what some dubbed as the "Aronian variation"

Round six

Daniel King shows the highlights of round 6

Andreikin: a man that is counting his lucky stars

Aronian, Levon ½-½ Andreikin, Dmitry

"I went completely mad" - Levon Aronian

Anand, Viswanathan ½-½ Karjakin, Sergey

A little energy before the game helped Karjakin
put all of his pieces in defensive positions

Anand prepared a long variation against the Berlin endgame, but Karjakin responded in the most logical and ultra-solid way. The Indian player was unable to prove any kind of advantage and the players agreed to a draw in a position that already seemed completely locked up by Black's passive but untouchable pieces.

Solid chess brings keeps Anand in the lead

Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar 1-0 Svidler, Peter

The gladiators in post-mortem

This game was certainly as strange as it gets. Svidler played the Dutch instead of the Gruenfeld, already a surprise. Mamedyarov played very erratically and managed to be worse after only 20 moves of chess. Svidler had a powerful continuation with a timely 22...Qd7! which would have left him with a powerful initiative. Instead of that he got himself in a position where it was difficult to find a move, and he blundered a pawn and his king safety with it.

Mamedyarov simply kept up the pressure and a cute tactic before entering the opposite colored bishop endgame gave him three passed pawns and sealed Svidler's fate.

Svidler came out for the kill, got the advantage but made too many mistakes

Topalov, Veselin 1-0 Kramnik, Vladimir

No handshake between these two.
Kramnik is about to make the antipositional 10...f5!?

"I played this move, 9.Be5 which is objectively dubious, but I thought for one game it was ok.
It was pretty deep, maybe for him too deep" - Veselin Topalov

Cristian Chirila - Guest Commentator Former World u-16 Champion and currently a grandmaster finishing his studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, Cristian is an ambitious chess player. Find out more about Cristian, including his chess lesson services, biography and games here.

Games of the round:

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Standings after six rounds

Photos from the official website

Schedule and results

Note: the games are played at 3 PM local time, which is 10 a.m. CET (Paris) and 5 a.m. EST (New York). Click here if you are uncertain what that means for your local time.

Playchess commentary

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