Astana World Rapid: Carlsen dominates

World blitz and rapid chess championship

The Official World Blitz and Rapid Chess Championships are being held from July 1-11, 2012, in Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan. It is worth noting that the Rapid Chess Championship is a first in the history of FIDE! The top ten players of the current FIDE rating list have the right to take part in the championships. The total prize fund is US $400,000.

The qualifiers held prior to the finals saw chess players from all over the world getting a chance to advance to the main event. Alexey Dreev, Igor Kurnosov and Vladislav Tkachiev won places, Murtas Kazhgaleyev and Anuar Ismagambetov were nominations by the host nation.

Second day

Of the 40 games played on day two, thirteen were drawn (=32.5%). White won 19 games, Black eight. It is interesting to note that White had an overall performance of 2812, while Black played at a 2619 level. This was quite unlike the first day, when there were 17 draws, 13 white and 10 black wins, with performances of 2750 for White and 2680 for Black.

The dominating player was world number one Magnus Carlsen, who started the day with two draws (against Dreev and Gelfand), but then won the remaining three games. Magnus has not lost a single game and drawn a total of just three of the ten games he has played so far. "The Norwgian keeps sculpturing masterpieces," says the official Google translation of the tournament bulletin. His secret seems to be (and we have seen this so often in the past) to keep piling on the pressure in and endgame position where other GMs would concede a draw. He simply waits for the opponent to crack, and crack they do. Hypnotism?! Here are some examples:

And here is one from day one:

After ten rounds of play we have the following scores:

Remaining program

World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship

The World Rapid Chess Championship will be played in three days as a round-robin event with five rounds per day. Time controls are 15 minutes for all moves plus 10 seconds increment per move. The World Blitz is a sixteen-player double round robin with 15 rounds per day. The time control is three minutes + two seconds increment per move. These are the participants

Tiebreak rules for first place: (a) results between the players involved; (b) number of wins; (c) Sonneborn-Berger score; (d) Sudden death game: 5 min vs 4 min.

Videos of the first day in Astana (Russian, with English subtitles)

• Lots of video reports like those above are to be found here

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games of the Finals 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 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

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