Vidit Chess Tour: Aronyak and Gukesh in the final

Final: Gukesh vs Aronyak

Besides the Champions Chess Tour, a “Vidit Chess Tour” is taking place as a qualifying event for the tour organized by the Magnus Carlsen Group. This online tournament is being played as a knockout on March 4-7 with 16 players from India on the chess24 platform. The participants qualified to the event by playing preliminary blitz tournaments. The first two players from each blitz open tournament qualified to the knockout tournament.

In the knockout, two games are played per round with a time limit of 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move — four games will take place in the final. In case of a draw, an Armageddon decider will be played.

The first prize is 1,000 US dollars. The top eight players will get an invitation to the Indian qualifying tournament for the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour.

Gukesh and Aronyak reached the final. The former defeated Vishnu Prassana, Mitrabha Guha and Narayanan S. L. on his way to the deciding match; while the latter got the better of Abhijeet Gupta, Harsha Bharathakoti and Erigaisi Arjun to reach the final.

Live games and commentary

The Fashionable Caro-Kann Vol.1 and 2

The Caro Kann is a very tricky opening. Black’s play is based on controlling and fighting for key light squares. It is a line which was very fashionable in late 90s and early 2000s due to the successes of greats like Karpov, Anand, Dreev etc. Recently due to strong engines lot of key developments have been made and some new lines have been introduced, while others have been refuted altogether. I have analyzed the new trends carefully and found some new ideas for Black.

Commentary by Srinath Narayanan and Vidit Gujrathi

Top 16 Qualifiers

The qualifier events took place on February 21-28 on Tornelo. The time control for each event was 3 minutes for the games plus 2-second increments.

Here are the results:

Event 1 (21 February) - GM Arjun Erigaisi 8.0/9 and GM Harsha Bharathakoti 7.5/9
Event 2 (22 February) - GM Raunak Sadhwani 8.5/9 and GM Abhimanyu Puranik 7.5/9
Event 3 (23 February) - GM Narayanan S L 8.0/9 and IM Mitrabha Guha 8.0/9
Event 4 (24 February) - GM Praggnanandhaa 7.5/9 and IM Sammed Shete 7.5/9
Event 5 (25t February) - GM Visakh N R 8.0/9 and IM Arjun Kalyan 7.5/9
Event 6 (26 February) - IM Aronyak Ghosh 8.0/9 and GM D Gukesh 7.0/9
Event 7 (27 February) - IM Pranesh M 7.5/9 and GM Vishnu Prasanna 7.0/9
Event 8 (28 February) - GM Abhijeet Gupta 7.5/9 and GM Diptayan Ghosh 7.0/9