The Week in Chess

The third day of potentially five of the semifinals of the "Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour Final benefiting Kiva" saw Hikaru Nakamura qualify for the final with a third set win. Magnus Carlsen took the lead for the first time in his match against Ding with a 2.5-0.5 victory and now leads 2-1. Ding will have to win tomorrow in order to take the match into a final day. Nakamura gets a couple of days to prepare for his opponent which he said he will assume will be Carlsen for the moment.

Magnus Carlsen took the lead after winning two sharp Sicilians in a row against Ding Liren. In game one Carlsen drew reasonably easily with black in a King's Indian Fianchetto which finished in a draw by repetition. Game two Carlsen was surprised when Ding switched to a Najdorf Sicilian. Carlsen played a marvelous positional game and after 22...Bh4 23.g5! Carlsen was pretty much winning. Carlsen wanted to play 27.Bxf7+ which indeed is winning but couldn't see his way to the end but kept an advantage for a while but after 37.Rc3 the position was about equal but after Ding failed to find 38....Nc5 or 39...Nc5 he quickly got a lost position again from which he could not recover. Game three was also a Sicilian with Carlsen as black, again Carlsen had much the better of it but for the error 19...Qc7? when if Ding had found 20.Nb3! he would have had good winning chances. As it was Carlsen won with a crushing attack to win the set and take a 2-1 lead.

Hikaru Nakamura reached the final of the competition with a 2.5-1.5 win against Daniil Dubov. Nakamura was in slight trouble in game one but once he held this he seemed to be in charge of the rest of the match. In game two Nakamura was better but settled for a draw, in game three Nakamura took the initiative around move 37 and won a nice endgame. The final game finished in a draw by repetition in a winning position for Nakamura. All-in-all a surprising 3-0 win for Nakamura who said that he felt his big mistake in losing the Lindores Abbey final to Dubov was continuing to press when he'd lost the advantage. He also admitted to playing much more solidly and technically against Dubov in the hope of suppressing his creativity. Nakamura does not expect such an approach to work against Carlsen should he play him.