Candidates Rd9: Decisive Round?!

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.

Round Nine

Daniel King shows the highlights of round 9

Karjakin dashes Kramnik's chances to quickly catch up to Anand

Karjakin, Sergey 1-0 Kramnik, Vladimir
Karjakin played a sideline against Kramnik, one that is seen very rarely at the top level. This paid off very handsomely as Kramnik inexplicably blundered as soon as move seven. 7...dxc4?? simply left him down a pawn and his position did not have even the slightest bit of compensation. It is strange to think even what he missed, as most of the lines were rather obvious.

Now trailing by 1.5 points Kramnik seems to have few
chances to challenge Carlsen for the World Title this year

Karjakin made his win a lot harder than he should have, eventually reaching a double rook endgame up two pawns that he had to figure out how to win, but he managed in the end.

Karjakin won an important game. Topalov lost an important one.

Andreikin, Dmitry ½-½ Svidler, Peter
Probably the least interesting game of the round. Svidler seemed to obtain a slight advantage with Black in the recently popular h3 Najdorf, but he didn't play the most accurately and the endgame fizzled into a draw in a situation where potentially Svidler could have tried to press on.

Andreikin's opening did not net him anything but a bad position

Svidler's games have been up and down and many
could have had a very different result than they did

Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar 1-0 Aronian, Levon

Mamedyarov delivered a huge blow to Aronian

The Armenian simply pressed too recklessly and is
now far from winning the tournament

Anand, Viswanathan 1-0 Topalov, Veselin
This game was instrumental to the tournament. Anand obtained a pleasant position from the opening, an unusual version of the h3 Najdorf. His pieces seemed better prepared to attack his opponent's structure. This in turn transformed into an endgame in which White's queen and bishop were superior to his opponent's, not to mention that the structure favored White. Anand's advantage was small but stable.

A very bad decision by Topalov was to play the move 31...h6? With an exposed king and a nearly zugzwanged position, Topalov was forced to shed a pawn and go into a surely losing queen endgame. Anand's technique wasn't absolutely flawless but it was good enough to bring home the victory.

Anand is effectively up 1.5 points over his competition - Aronian's tiebreak is worse than his

Aronian must win all his games to try to pressure Anand. Can he do so? How will he attempt to bounce back from a tough defeat? Join us in the 10th round on March 25th (notice that the 24th is a free day for the players).

Games of the round:

Click on drop-down menu for all games

Standings after nine 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

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 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.