4/9/2018 – From March 31st to April 9th, the Grenke Chess Classic takes place in Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden, Germany. Ten grandmasters play a single round-robin, headed by World Champion Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, the winner of the 2017 tournament, Fabiano Caruana, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Viswanathan Anand. Live games and commentary webcast. | Photo: Macauley Peterson
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Round nine
The Grenke Chess Classic is the first tournament for World Champion Magnus Carlsen since he won the Tata Steel Chess tournament in January and the start of a busy few months. He faced his future Challenger for the World Championship, Fabiano Caruana, fresh off his Berlin win, already in the first round.
Fabiano Caruana won his last round game against Nikita Vitiugov, and therefore secured clear first place.
The time control is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and then 15 minutes to the end of the game, with a 30-second increment from move 1.
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Commentary by GM Peter Leko and GM Jan Gustafsson
Current standings
Peter Leko's Round 9 recap
Vincent Keymer wins Grenke Open
The Grenke Chess Open in Karlsruhe ran from March 29th to April 2nd. The top A-open group contained over 300 players including over 50 grandmasters, four of whom are over 2700: Etienne Bacrot, Richard Rapport, Wang Hao and Dmitry Andreikin.
@ jif - This is one of the (now less common) events with no prize money, only starting fees for the players, which are not disclosed but which generally range widely from perhaps as low as 5,000 euro to as high as 50,000 for a ten-day tournament such as this.
I agree it's a strange system.
@mvh999 - The photo was a quirk of how they were positioned on stage vis-a-vis the lighting. But have a look at the round 9 specific article published today: https://en.chessbase.com/post/grenke-chess-classic-2018-round-9
jif 4/10/2018 03:04
What was the prize money for this event?
Pretty strange that is not easy to find on the internet.
Good thing we have chess news sites to not tell us, but maybe I'm the only one interested.
nuit 4/10/2018 10:29
bravo fabio!!!
j'espère que tu iras au bout contre magnus.
mvh999 4/10/2018 05:16
Agree, great tournament with a lot of fighting games. It would have been nice/appropriate though if the lead-in photo featured the winner (Caruana) rather than the runner-up (Carlsen), apparently at the expense of two of the not shown third place finishers.
Resistance 4/10/2018 02:21
Great tournament, and great games. Congratulations to all players and to Fabiano for his incredible victory. (He managed to impose his will over a pretty strong field of players, which included none other than the World Champion himself, despite the huge ammount of physical and nervous energy that the phenomenal Candidates Tournament at Berlin must've taken from him, just two weeks ago. Bravo Fabiano! -- but please, take a good rest now so your mind and body can properly recover for the challenges that lie ahead).
JackCrabb 4/10/2018 01:39
Dear macaulay, "it's logical to keep the ratings at the start of the tournament." Of course - if you do that properly, i.e. take their present ratings. The previous FIDE list is no safe source for that, as the figures there are up to date only if the player hasn't played any tournaments in the meantime.
Instead, the present rating is always the one a player got at the end of his latest tournament. Which means in case of Caruana and Aronian you should have taken the ELOs they had achieved at the Berlin Candidates.
Bobbyfozz 4/10/2018 01:00
Caruana is very strong, and stronger this year than last. He deserves his wins and doesn't believe in offering a draw when he thinks he has a win, and that's MY style of chess. Otherwise it makes you look weak to your peers. He's not weak, anything but...
SambalOelek 4/9/2018 08:02
Corona wins again...cheerz!
kyi 4/7/2018 05:34
In the sixth game between Caruana and Hou, she missed the winning chance. According to the comments, if Hou played 64...Kd2 followed by 65...Nd3 sacrificing the knight, she would win the game. Who saw this winning move ? GM commentator himself without the help of chess engine or the chess engine itself. I am just curious.
macauley 4/6/2018 05:00
@Raymond Labelle - We wrote about April ratings last week (https://en.chessbase.com/post/april-2018-fide-ratings) but this tournament began in March, so it's logical to keep the ratings at the start of the tournament.
Raymond Labelle 4/5/2018 11:02
Note that Caruana's current official FIDE rating as of April 1, 2018 is 2804 and not 2784 as indicated in the chart above.
Note that Aronian's current official FIDE rating as of April 1, 2018 is 2767 and not 2794 as indicated in the chart above.
See: https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men
kbala 4/5/2018 07:40
kyi 3/31/2018 10:10
I thought Carlsen was winning but fortunately for Caruana, the game ended in a draw. It is a well fought game. Unlike the heydays of Fischer, most of the high level chess games end in draw because most GMs have the advantage and help of computers in studying chess nowadays. Although the first game is drawn, Carlsen is still the favorite to win this tournament in my opinion.
Carlsen was dead lost, but escaped.
Aighearach 4/2/2018 11:08
Using the rank with ties as ties in one dimension turns it from a crosstable into just a table. Rankings are better that way when you're showing both, but doing that to the crosstable just makes it harder to use.
amarpan 4/1/2018 10:03
We must bear in mind that Caruana and Aronian just finished playing at the candidates and wont be as well rested as the others.
SambalOelek 3/31/2018 10:29
saw the result..for a while i was thinking Carlsen was crushing Corona beer
..and still a draw??
kyi 3/31/2018 10:10
I thought Carlsen was winning but fortunately for Caruana, the game ended in a draw. It is a well fought game. Unlike the heydays of Fischer, most of the high level chess games end in draw because most GMs have the advantage and help of computers in studying chess nowadays. Although the first game is drawn, Carlsen is still the favorite to win this tournament in my opinion.
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