The Week in Chess

Top seed Levon Aronian was the main casualty of the third round of the FIDE World Cup in Tromso. Aronian played the Whip Benoni which is dubious but he hoped would surprise Evgeny Tomashevsky who had beaten him in the first game. In fact Aronian had played it before and even though Tomashevsky suggested it as a possibility to his second (who laughed) he didn't prepare it for this game (although had looked at it in the past). Tomashevsky was determined to play with principal, he was critical of 12.Bg5 as being second best to 12.Rb1 but continued to play aggressive sacrificing with 19.Nxh7. Aronian had at least got a sharp position with mutual chances but perpetual check was always most likely which eventually happened. Houdini found 24...Nb4 which it gave as favourable to Aronian but it's not even clear if running the program longer might give a different assessment but it's hard to see any human playing that move. So Aronian is a Candidate via rating but goes home.

In the end just 6 players are through to the next round and 10 matches go to play-offs on Monday. The final game to finish was Alexander Grischuk against Le Quang Liem where the Russian ground on and on in a slightly favourable position in the attempt to get the win he needed to go to level the match. Grischuk down on the clock and having to give up a pawn suddenly got chances when the draw seemed likely and eventually won in 154 moves.

Julio Granda Zuniga performed the comeback of the day outplaying Anish Giri to level the match with black. This was an impressive performance given the nightmare circumstances he had lost the first game on the verge of a win the day before.

Elsewhere Hikaru Nakamura won a second game in a row against Adhiban in the only other decisive game of the day. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Boris Gelfand got the draws they needed without too much drama and will meet in the next round. Gata Kamsky made light work of qualifying against Jon Ludvig Hammer.

Peter Svidler mocked his own efforts as he got dragged into an ultra-theoretical variation against Teimour Radjabov where his preparation involved being an entire rook down, the absurdity of which suddenly occurred to him during the game. Svidler made life hard for himself by bailing out to an ending he could lose when a further temporary sacrifice may have won the entire game or at least made it easier to draw. He felt a little bit dissatisfied in spite of his progression.

Amongst those going to play-offs are Vladimir Kramnik who got a little something with black against Alexander Areshchenko but it never looked enough to win and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov who drew quickly with Wei Yi although the 14 year old is surely going to be big under-dog in the rapid and blitz (he hardly pulled up any trees last month in the 3rd Chinese Master Rapid).

Playoff matches Monday: Morozevich-Vitiugov, Mamedyarov-Yi Wei, Karjakin-Eljanov, Dreev-Andreikin, Caruana-Malakhov, Granda Zuniga-Giri, Kramnik-Areshchenko, Kryvoruchko-Ivanchuk, Dubov-Korobov and Le Quang Liem-Grischuk.