The Week in Chess

Fabiano Caruana beat Magnus Carlsen to move to a clear lead with 3/3 by a point and a half in another fighting round three of the Sinquefield Cup. Carlsen called his opening (starting with 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4) "pretty bad" and Caruana invited a sacrifice of a piece from Carlsen which wasn't favourable for white. Carlsen was then under pressure on the board and on the clock for some time and at one point seemed to be getting out of it but in fact was always still in a pretty bad position. Then Carlsen made life easy blundering his entire position away but the game was probably gone in any event.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave scored his first win of the tournament against Levon Aronian after the Armenian tried a little too hard to punish a rather passive opening with a very risky pawn grab that left black with a rather passive position. Aronian's 15...Rf5 looked very risky and it turned out to be also very bad and after that he really didn't have a chance to recover.

Veselin Topalov was of course happy to win his game against Hikaru Nakamura but called the game "very bad" afterwards. Nakamura couldn't quite find his way through to the end of a sacrifice with 21.Bxf2+ but instead he blamed himself for losing the thread later on. But even after 27.Bd2? he had the chance of a large advantage with 27...Nh5 and even my first thought in commentary of 27...Nb7 with the idea of Nd6-f5 was better than he played. In the end Nakamura's position just collapsed rather rapidly.

Round 3 standings: Caruana 3pts/3, Vachier-Lagrave, Aronian 1.5, Nakamura, Carlsen, Topalov 1pt.

Round 4 pairings: Vachier-Lagrave-Nakamura, Carlsen-Topalov, Caruana-Aronian.

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