Maxime Vachier-Lagrave wins Dortmund 2016

by Johannes Fischer
7/17/2016 – With a fine game against Ruslan Ponomariov Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won the Sparkassen Chess-Meeting in Dortmund with one round to go. He leads with 5.0/6 and is 1.5 points ahead of his closest rivals Leinier Dominguez Perez and Fabiano Caruana. The other decisive game of round six was Caruana's smooth victory against Rainer Buhmann. Evgeniy Najer and Dominguez Perez drew after 54 moves, Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu and Vladimir Kramnik after 146 moves.

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The International Arbiter Andrzej Filipovicz from Poland

The symbolic first move

After playing Vladimir Kramnik and Fabiano Caruana with Black,
Rainer Buhmann also had Black against...

...Fabiano Caruana

Fabiano Caruana avoided a theoretical duel but reached
a double-edged position with good chances to play for a win.

 

The top game of round six was the encounter between...

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and...

... Ruslan Ponomariov. With a win Ponomariov would have caught the French grandmaster.

But right from the start Maxime Vachier-Lagrave had the game under control showed a fine display of strategy and tactics that culminated in a mating attack in the endgame.

 

Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, who has not lost one of his last 58 games, played against Vladimir Kramnik...

... who tried hard to win this game.

The game lasted for 146 moves and Kramnik tried everything to win but in the end he could not avoid to play his sixth draw in his sixth game in Dortmund. In the seventh and final round Kramnik plays against Evgeniy Najer. Nisipeanu, who also has six draws out of six games in Dortmund, plays against Buhmann in the final round.

Evgeniy Najer...

... and Leinier Dominguez Perez (left) drew an unspectactular game.

Result of round six:

Fabiano Caruana - Rainer Buhmann 1-0

Evgeniy Najer - Leinier Dominguez Perez 1/2-1/2

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave - Ruslan Ponomariov 1-0

Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu - Vladimir Kramnik 1/2-1/2

Games from rounds 1- to 6

 

Standings after six rounds

Photos: Tournament page, Georgios Souleidis

Tournament page...


Johannes Fischer was born in 1963 in Hamburg and studied English and German literature in Frankfurt. He now lives as a writer and translator in Nürnberg. He is a FIDE-Master and regularly writes for KARL, a German chess magazine focusing on the links between culture and chess. On his own blog he regularly publishes notes on "Film, Literature and Chess".

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