Chess: Magnus Carlsen World Rapid champion again and targets Blitz

Magnus Carlsen, the highest ranked player in history, led a 202-player field almost all the way to retain his World Rapid crown at Samarkand on Thursday with an unbeaten 10/13 total, seven wins and six draws.

It was the fifth Rapid title for the 33-year-old Norwegian, who abdicated his classical crown last year as he preferred faster time limits. In rapid chess, each player has 15 minutes for all the moves plus 10 additional seconds for each move starting from move one.

Final leading scores were Carlsen (Norway) 10/13, Vladimir Fedoseev (Slovenia) 9.5, Yu Yangyi (China) and 11 other players on 9, including the world No 2, Fabiano Caruana, and the teenagers Volodar Murzin, 17, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 18, and Nodirbek Abdusattorov, 19.

The direct encounter between Fedoseev and Carlsen proved the Rapid decider, as the No 1 enticed the white king up the board into a mating attack. Carlsen said later: “It feels great. I thought the key moment was against Fedoseev. He is the only one who could catch me. Sometimes I was playing my games a little bit too safe, but I don’t think I was ever really in trouble.”

After 12 of the 21 rounds in the World Blitz on Friday, Carlsen, again the defending champion, shares the lead on 9/12 along with five other players. He is still unbeaten, but has conceded six draws.

The leading group is Vladislav Artemiev and Alexander Riazantsev (both Russia), Nihal Sarin and Arjun Erigaisi (India), Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France) and Carlsen (Norway) all 9/12. A further 22 players are half a point or a point behind. Round 13 starts at 9am on Saturday.

In an action with few precedents, Daniil Dubov and Ian Nepomniachtchi’s round 11 draw was scored as a zero for both Russians. Their game was a symmetrical knight dance which ended back in the starting position with the knights switched between b1/g1 and b8/g8: 1 Nf3 Nf6 2 Nd4 Nd5 3 Nb3 Nb6 4 Nc3 Nc6 5 Ne4 Ne5 6 Ng5 Ng4 7 Nf3 Nf6 8 Ng1 Ng8 9 Nc5 Nc4 10 Na4 Na5 11 Nc3 Nc6 12 Nb1 Nb8 13 Nf3.

The Chief Arbiter, Ivan Syrovy, cited Fide Law of Chess 11.1: “The players shall take no action that will bring the game of chess into disrepute”, and the penalty option for the arbiter of “reducing the points scored in the game by the offending player”. Syrovy added: “I consider that they prearranged the result of the game.”

The GMs appealed, claiming that other games in the World Blitz had been drawn after just two or three moves, and that they were tired because the tournament was running an hour late. Then a video emerged showing Dubov and Nepomniachtchi talking together before their game and discussing what moves they would make. The Appeals Committee voted 3-0 to uphold the Chief Arbiter’s decision, and the Russian pair were relegated from joint first to joint sixth.

In an event of 21 rounds, the punishment was just a slap on the wrist and could even motivate them in Saturday’s play.

At halfway in the 17-round Women’s World Blitz, Russia’s Valentina Gunina has broken clear of the field. Gunina’s 8.5/9 total leads a quintet of rivals, including the Women’s Rapid champion, Anastasia Bondaruk, and the highly ranked Alexandra Kosteniuk and Kateryna Lagno, by 1.5 points. Round 10 starts on Saturday at 9am.

Gunina, a 34-year-old from Murmansk, in 2016 trounced a field of 475 including several top English players in a rapid event at the London Classic. She said: “I like blitz, there are so many emotions and adrenaline.”

Anastasia Bodnaruk, a 31-year-old Russian playing under a neutral Fide flag, was the surprise champion of the Women’s World Rapid after winning a blitz play-off 2.5-1,5 against India’s Humpy Koneru. Le Tingjie (China) was third. All three scored 8.5/11. Koneru lost on time in the decisive playoff game.

Earlier in the Rapid, Carlsen demolished Tigran L Petrosian (no relation of the former world champion) by exploiting the Armenian’s weakened king defences. The creative Daniil Dubov and the rising talent Murzin both won miniatures. The world under-8 champion, Roman Shogdzhiev, beat two grandmasters, with the final stages of one of his victories captured on video. There were blunders, too. This game is the nearest you will ever get to a grandmaster falling for Scholar’s Mate.

Offboard, the main controversy was about Fide’s new detailed dress code for the World Rapid/Blitz, and its first victim, the Netherlands WIM and streamer Anna-Maja Kazarian, who was fined €100 for wearing what she denied were sports sneakers.

Meanwhile, the race for the two final spots in the 2023 Candidates, which will decide the challenger to China’s Ding Liren, has continued. India’s Dommaraju Gukesh is sure of the Fide Circuit place, but the question of who takes the rating spot went down to the wire on Friday morning, and could possibly coninue beyond that.

Alireza Firouzja, needing to make up rating points on the USA’s Wesley So, had the help of the French federation, which arranged a series of mini-matches against hand-picked veteran grandmasters in Firouzja’s home town Chartres. The former Iranian needed to win all six games to pass So, but failed at the final hurdle where he offered a draw in a lost position against Sergey Fedorchuk. Following protests from the US federation and others, Fide is likely to refuse to rate the Chartres event as artificially staged for Firouzja’s benefit.

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Firouzja then made a very late entry to the Rouen Open, starting on 26 December. His Chartres clubmate Gata Kamsky, who challenged Anatoly Karpov for the Fide world title in 1996, also entered.

This time, all went well for Firouzja. He won his first five games in good style, then, on Thursday evening, triumphed in his key game against Kamsky.

Firouzja overcame the final hurdle at Rouen by reaching 7/7 on Friday morning. With the Chartres matches excluded, Firouzja’s live rating is now up to 2759 against 2757 for So. By a strange quirk of fate, his round seven opponent was 71-year-old Kamran Shirazi, a former champion of Iran and also the player, who when competing in the United States, lost the shortest game ever in the history of the US Championship (Shirazi v John Peters, Berkeley, California 1984: 1 e4 c5 2 b4 cxb4 3 a3 d5 4 exd5 Qxd5 5 axb4?? Qe5+ 0-1)

Overall, Firouzja deserved it. His seven games at Rouen were high class, and significantly better quality than his six at Chartres. This week’s action still has some potential to end up in Lausanne at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but less than it did before Rouen. Whatever the final outcome, Firouzja is still only 20 and will have at least another four attempts at the world title, which has a two-year cycle, in the prime of his career.

The 97th edition of the Caplin Hastings Masters, the world’s longest running annual congress, got under way on Thursday with all eyes on Shreyas Royal, The 14-year-old from Greenwich, South London, is hunting his third and final grandmaster norm, although he will also need to achieve a 2500 Fide rating (at present it is 2438) to be awarded the title.

The late Tony Miles was 20 when he became Britain’s first grandmaster in 1976. Nigel Short became a GM at 19 in 1984, followed by Adams at 17 in 1989, McShane at 16 years seven months in 2000, and David Howell at 16 years one month in 2007. Royal, whose first GM norm was achieved at a record 13 years nine months, and gained his second at the recent London Classic, is well placed to set a new landmark at Hastings or later.

Royal began well in Thursday’s opening round, outclassing his amateur opponent, 1907-rated Luke Honey.

3900 1 Qh6 Qxe5 2 Qxh7+! Kxh7 3 Kg2 mate.