TWIC is 30. First issue 17th September 1994.
Airthings Masters 2020 (Day 9)
Teimour Radjabov wins the Airthings Masters
Mark Crowther - Sunday 3rd January 2021
Radjabov wins the Airthings Masters. Photo © | https://chess24.com
Teimour Radjabov won the first Masters event of the "Meltwater" Champions Chess Tour winning $60,000 and has qualified for the finals in September. Earlier in the day it was announced that Meltwater were the new tour sponsors. Meltwater are a media monitoring company founded in Norway but now based in San Francisco, the tour finals will be held in that city assuming that the Coronavirus crisis doesn't prevent travel.
Radjabov was extremely hard to defeat losing just one rapid game - to Ian Nepomniachtchi - in the entire event counting both the preliminaries and the final. The match with Nepomniachtchi was when Radjabov was closest to going out. He lost the aforementioned rapid game, then also the first tie-break blitz game before coming back to win in a second blitz game and then holding a draw with black in an Armageddon game to go through. He followed this with classy controlled performances against Daniil Dubov and now Levon Aronian.
Radjabov won the World Cup in 2019 but to me this feels even more like a return to the very top of World Chess. After taking some time to get used to playing online it looks like he has discovered a real taste for the game again. I think this finally puts to rest the disaster Radjabov had in the 2013 Candidates that almost completely derailed his career.
Next tour event doesn't yet have a name but is a regular 16 player event rather than a 12 player Major like the Airthings Masters was. Ding Liren has been voted in as a participant by Chess24 subscribers. The dates are 6th to 14th February 2021.
Summary of the day's play below.
Summary of the final day
Radjabov having won the first set yesterday only had to draw today. Game one, an extremely sharp Giuoco Piano saw Radjabov doing well out of the opening so Aronian turned to very sharp tactics to try and turn the tide. 21.e5!? loses to precisely one move sequence, 21...d3!! - opening up the power of the a7 bishop - 22.Qxd3 fxe3 - capturing with this pawn means a later check on e3 can attack white's Queen and save black - absolutely impossible to see for a human. After 21...dxe3 22.Qg6+ Aronian was winning but his 29.Re6? was completely wrong and allowed Rajdabov to get a winning position but after all the excitement the game was drawn by repetition. Game two was an usual Gruenfeld where Radjabov got a small edge with white in a rook and bishop of opposite colours position, the way he made the most of his chances was extremely impressive and he won in 62 moves meaning he only needed one draw to win the title. Game three was another Giuoco Piano, this time a more positional game, Aronian was a little better but around about move 30 Radjabov equalised and then precisely liquidated all the pieces to get the draw and win the match. Aronian will obviously be disappointed but like Radjabov it took looks like he's on an upswing finding motivation in this format to return to something close to his best.
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave won a fine fourth game in a match otherwise quite dominated by Daniil Dubov. In game one Dubov was close to winning but somehow messed things up and lost, game two Dubov was much, much better again but had to settle for a draw. Dubov levelled things in game 3 before losing to MVL's best and most consistent effort in the match. As yesterday's tie finished 2-2 MVL finished in 3rd place, Dubov in 4th.
Radjabov quotes:
"Today it was really tough. Trying to keep the focus and concentration to the very end and takes a lot of emotions as well to keep this way of calmness that I am trying to produce and not to show if I am happy or unhappy about my position.
"But it just took so much energy I am completely exhausted."
He added that he took the tournament "super serious".
Aronian said: "I have some mixed feeling because I am upset with the way I played in the final but generally I played well in the tournament."
"I knew I had to take risks, but probably I was making some strange decisions."
Airthings Masters (two levels of English commentary) 2020
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