The Week in Chess

The Superbet Chess Classic got underway in Bucharest, Romania with a pretty quiet day of play. This is the first of two classical events as part of the Grand Chess Tour, the second and final one will be the Sinquefield Cup in August. Only Anish Giri was in any danger when his choice of the combative Semi-Slav with black got out of control against Bogdan-Daniel Deac, but this was a brief chance and the game was eventually drawn. It must have been very strange to play over the board for many of these players and there was a lot of fairly well known theoretical chess played with quick draws being the result.

Bogdan-Daniel Deac, the last minute replacement for Richard Rapport almost managed a shock win against Anish Giri. This was a super sharp Semi-Slav similar to the Botvinnik variation (I'm unsure if in this version it is known as that). With opposite sides castling white was clearly doing well but after 28...c5? he had a clean win according to the computer with 29. Re5 Qxg3 30. Rh5 Qxd6 31. Rxh8+ Kd7 32. Rxd6+ Kxd6 although to my eyes this looks quite hard for a human to calculate. The game finished in a draw.

Radjabov-Caruana was a draw that's well known in the Ragozin, I learned it from a Chessable course by Christof Sielecki and Daniel Barrish. Mamedyarov-Wesley So was a Queen's Gambit Accepted where black obtained comfortable equality out of the opening. Grischuk-MVL was a draw in a long theoretical Gruenfeld line, they followed So-Nepomniachtchi from the recent Crpyto Cup and by the time the new move came a draw was a near certainty. Lupulescu-Aronian was another well known drawish line that I know from the aforementioned Chessable course. This was the first game to finish.

Round 2 Sunday 6th June 1pm BST pairings: So-Aronian, Caruana-Lupulescu, Giri-Radjabov, MVL-Deac, Mamedyarov-Grischuk.