Khanty Rd7: Three White Wins

The fourth and final stage of the 2014-2015 Grand Prix Series. This tournament is specially important as it will determine the winner and runner up of this year, both of which will automatically qualify for the 2015 Candidates Tournament - the winner of that will challenge Magnus Carlsen to the World Championship Match! The tournament is taking place in Khanty-Mansiysk, Ugra, Russia from May 13 to May 27.

Round Seven

Caruana, Fabiano ½-½ Gelfand, Boris
The ...c6 Fianchetto Grunfeld remains very solid. Despite some crazy tactics in the middlegame the duel eventually reached a completely drawn position on move 30.

Gelfand's seventh draw in this tournament. Out of seven!

Jakovenko, Dmitry ½-½ Grischuk, Alexander
The players started a repetition on move 17 and the draw was sealed.

Grischuk and Karjakin arriving last minute

Karjakin, Sergey ½-½ Jobava, Baadur
You can always count on an interesting game when Jobava is playing. He sacrificed a pawn, and then an exchange, and then another pawn, all in the hopes of creating active play for his pieces, specially his bishops. Black was always down a fair amount of material, but Karjakin had problems finding a safe place for his king and his coordination was not the best.

Eventually the Russian player decided to give back some material and a strange endgame with rook and two pawns vs. two bishops arose, with a bunch of other pieces. The evaluation was difficult to discern, both sides having many good and bad things. A repetition finished the game in a draw, though both sides could have played for the win (or the loss!).

Nakamura, Hikaru 1-0 Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime
Unbelievably, MVL's fourth straight loss:

Nakamura puts himself in a good positoin to qualify fo the
Candidates, while MVL simply needs to stop bleeding in this tournament.

Giri, Anish 1-0 Tomashevsky, Evgeny
A complicated Spanish. It seemed that Tomashevsky obtained an acceptable position early on, but Giri played rather well, putting pressure all over the board before finally settling on attacking the kingside. White's beautifully anchored knight on c4 kept up the pressure on the center and the a5 pawn while White tried to break through Black's pawn structure in the center.

Giri had control over the game; Tomashevsky needs victories desperately to keep in the race

A risky but timely 38.g4!? opened up even more lines and Tomashevsky did not respond in the best way. His position did not hold together and Giri collected an important point for him, while this loss means that Tomashevsky is currently out of the Candidates.

Dominguez, Leinier 1-0 Svidler, Peter
A textbook example of how to play the modern Ruy Lopez. White's blockade on the light squares and his pair of bishops slowly took over the game. The excellent transfer of White's queen to the kingside, supporting the f4 break, gave Dominguez a sizeable advantage. He nurtured and and won in excellent style. Svidler was simply given no counterplay at any point, and it will be important for theoreticians to analyze where exactly he went wrong.

8.a4 has been a hot topic as an anti-Marshall

Standings

Round Seven Games

Select from the dropdown menu to replay the games

Photos from the official website by Kirill Merkurev

Schedule

Links Official tournament site Download all Games in PGN The games will be 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 13 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.