The Week in Chess

There were few out and out shocks on the first day of Round 2 of the FIDE World Cup in Tromso. At the top of the draw there were wins for the top seeds when they had white. This is a long and tough event and we could really see this today we saw good preparation, hard grind but also not a few errors as well.

Fabiano Caruana (long pressure followed by nice queen sacrifice to get a lethal passed pawn against Yu, Yangyi), Alexander Grischuk (in time pressure he set a nasty trap forcing mate against Dariusz Swiercz), Hikaru Nakamura (nice positional win), Gata Kamsky (targetted Aleksandr Shimanov's French, both sides were deeply prepared but Kamsky won the subsequent ending), Leinier Dominguez Perez beat Alexander Onischuk in nice game. Levon Aronian, Vladimir Kramnik (pressing then things nearly went wrong), Sergey Karjakin, Boris Gelfand and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (who missed a win).

Elsewhere in the draw the surprise of the round was veteran Julio Granda Zuniga's win against Peter Leko who gradually got outplayed in a positional game, Alexander Morozevich won a fluctuating game where he was better for most of the game against Rafael Leitao but for one move (35...Ng3+!) was lost against Rafael Leitao. Anish Giri beat Li Chao, Vassily Ivanchuk completely surprised Ray Robson with his choice of Petroff Variation with black and got the young American into terrible trouble on the clock and the board. Anton Korobov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Evgeny Tomashevsky won the other games.

The final game to finish saw Wang Hao not use the correct procedure to claim a draw by three-fold repetition against Aleksey Dreev but the arbiters allowed him to write down the move and reclaim after a time penalty which didn't please Dreev who missed a number of winning chances.

Full results below.