The Week in Chess

The first day of the knockout phase of the Skilling Open - the first event of the new online Champions Chess Tour hosted by Chess24 saw all four matches finish decisively. In a tweak to the format used earlier in the year sets can be drawn but the mini matches only take two days with tie-breaks if they're shared 1-1.

Magnus Carlsen had the worse of the first three games against Anish Giri - Giri was clearly winning in game one and pressing in the other two - but after these were all drawn it felt to me almost inevitable that Giri would lose game four and this is what happened. In that final game Giri took a risky long term decision to play 19.fxe3 compromising his pawn structure rather than having to deal with some short term inconveniences with Rxe3 and many moves later this weakness and the clock cost him the game and the set.

Teimour Radjabov beat Wesley So 2.5-0.5 in their first mini match. So aggressively sacrificed a piece as white in game one and although it wasn't quite sound Radjabov allowed a draw by repetition, So turned this down but should have taken it as he then lost quickly. Game two was a solid draw with white by Radjabov, game three finished in a time scramble and yet again So avoided a draw by repetition and instead he managed to get his king mated in the middle of the board.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave beat Hikaru Nakamura 2.5-1.5. MVL won game one in a Berlin but Nakamura really should have won game two early on and even though it looked like he had chances late on MVL held the draw with correct play. After that there were two more draws and MVL took the set.

Levon Aronian came back from losing game two to win games three and four to beat Ian Nepomniachtchi 2.5-1.5. In the final game four Nepomniachtchi's 25.Rb7? allowed a quick mating attack in a position where he was only a bit worse.

The second day of these matches start at 5pm on Thursday 26th Nov.

Champions Chess Tour competition dates have been published even if the events don't yet have names:

22-30 November: Regular ($100,000 prize)
26 December - 3 January: Major ($200,000 prize)
6-14 February: Regular ($100,000 prize)
13-21 March: Major ($200,000 prize)
24 April – 2 May: Regular ($100,000 prize)
22-30 May: Regular ($100,000 prize)
26 June – 4 July: Major ($200,000 prize)
31 July – 8 August: Regular ($100,000 prize)
28 August - 5 September: Regular ($100,000 prize)
25 September – 3 October: Final ($300,000 prize)