The Week in Chess

Tan Zhongyi was joined by Lei Tingjie and Aleksandra Goryachkina on 5pts after 8 Rounds of the Women's Candidates tournament in Toronto. It was all so unnecessary too, Tan turned down a draw by repetition by playing the risky and objectively not very good 21.f4 and her position more or less went downhill from there.

There's been very little for Humpy Koneru or Rameshbabu Vaishali to smile about in this event and the latter had her 3rd loss in a row, she was worse and then lost the exchange and that was pretty much that by move 17.

Kateryna Lagno against Aleksandra Goryachkina was a fairly well played Ruy Lopez Berlin which was agreed drawn by repetition on move 34. A small fly in the ointment of this tale is that instead of repeating with Qd2 Lagno could have played Bc1 which the engines say gave her a pretty large advantage.

Nurgyul Salimova was white against Anna Muzychuk and this was a marathon 120 move draw, although almost the last 50 of those was an attempt to win Rook vs Knight. Salimova had opportunities to win this game. The first key moment was where Salimova got her chances, 30.Nc7 left black having to find the only move 30...Ba4 for equality, instead the second best 30...Bxb4 was played and white was winning. The second key moment was white had to find 34.Ra1 for the largest advantage or 34.Bd3 to keep her big edge. Instead 34.f3 meant black was over the worst. White then pressed in a Rook and 3 pawns vs Knight and 4 pawns endgame. You have to be very careful in allowing transpositions to King and Pawn endgames, sometimes the result is not what you expect. Here for one move only white was winning with 54.Rxe5 and then an 8 move sequence leading to zugzwang had to be calculated (and other side variations). But given the winning chances were obviously not high continuing the way it was, maybe it was worth Salimova giving it a punt anyway, even if all the details couldn't be precisely seen it might have been possible to tell this was a potential opportunity.

Round 8 Standings: 1st= Lei Tingjie, Goryachkina, Tan Zhongyi 5pts; 4th Lagno 4.5pts; 5th= Salimova, Koneru 3.5.pts; 7th Muzychuk 3pts; 8th Vaishali 2.5pts.

Round 9 14th April at 19:30BST: Koneru-Lagno, Vaishali-Tan, Lei-Salimova, Muzychuk-Goryachkina.