8/15/2024 – Ian Nepomniachtchi (pictured), Alireza Firouzja and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave all scored 3/6 points on Wednesday and remained atop the standings of the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz Tournament. Going into the blitz, 9 out of 10 players in the field have realistic chances of winning the title - R Praggnanandhaa has been struggling in the event and is now a whole 7 points behind the co-leaders. | Photo: Lennart Ootes
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Nepo, Firouzja and MVL top the standings
More than half the games played on Wednesday finished decisively at the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz tournament. However, there were no big changes in the standings, as most players finished the day with a 50-percent score. The exceptions were Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura - who obtained a +1 - and R Praggnanandhaa, who finished with -2.
These results left Ian Nepomniachtchi, Alireza Firouzja and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave tied for first place with 11 points each. Levon Aronian remains in sole fourth place 1 point behind, while five other players have 8 or 9 points to their names. With 18 rounds of blitz to go, this means anything could still happen in Saint Louis. The one player who is having a mix of bad form and bad luck is Pragg - but we all expect him to recover in the final two days of action.
In this video course, experts including Dorian Rogozenco, Mihail Marin, Karsten Müller and Oliver Reeh, examine the games of Boris Spassky. Let them show you which openings Spassky chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were and much more.
Regarding the race for Grand Chess Tour points, things are looking good for Firouzja, who entered the event in second place in the tour standings, only behind Fabiano Caruana, who won both the Superbet Classic in Romania and the SuperUnited Rapid & Blitz in Croatia.
Alireza Firouzja | Photo: Lennart Ootes
The round-9 encounter between Firouzja and Aronian saw both kings remaining uncastled out of a French Defence. Aronian got a clear advantage in the tricky middlegame, but made a crucial mistake on move 30.
Firouzja v. Aronian
Black's active pieces and safer king (which was transferred to g8 'manually') grant him a major advantage. Aronian's 30...Bc6, however, was not the way to go here.
The path to victory begins with 30...Rxc2+, trading White's one active rook, and after 31.Kxc2 Ra8 32.Qb7 Ba4+ 33.Kd3 Rb8 34.Qa7 Rb3+ Black would have managed to bring his rook and bishop tandem to the attack while White is only defending with the knight.
Analysis diagram
Instead, after the text, it was White who traded rooks with 31.Rxc4, gaining one key tempo to bring his other rook to the defence - i.e. 31...dxc4 32.Rc1 Rb2+ 33.Rc2, and Black has lost most of the momentum he had a few moves ago.
In this video course, GM Surya Ganguly joins IM Sagar Shah and drawing from his colossal experience, shares some uncommon endgame wisdom. The material mostly features positions with rook against rook and a pawn, and starts by covering the fundamentals.
Carlos Alberto ColodroCarlos Colodro is a Hispanic Philologist from Bolivia. He works as a freelance translator and writer since 2012. A lot of his work is done in chess-related texts, as the game is one of his biggest interests, along with literature and music.
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In this insightful video course, Grandmaster David Navara shares practical advice on when to calculate deeply in a position — and just as importantly, when not to.
The Trompowsky is especially suited for faster time controls as you don‘t have to memorise endless lines of theory, and you push your opponent out of their comfort zone after your second move.
Trompowsky Powerbook 2025 is based on 53,000 computer games from the engine room of playchess.com as well as 49,000 games from Mega and correspondence chess.
Trompowsky Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 8727 games from Mega 2025 and the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 316 are annotated.
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Powerbook based on more than 618 000 games in which White already sidesteps the main variations of the Sicilian on move 2.
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