by With three rounds to go in the London Classic, the race at the top looks set to be between Britain’s eight-time champion, Michael Adams, 52, and the top-seeded Indian, Dommaraju Gukesh, 17.
Both leaders took advantage in Thursday’s sixth round of a mistake by their opponents. Adams got a full-point swing when Jules Moussard blindly left himself a bishop on move 32. A simple pawn move kept the Frenchman in a winning position.
Gukesh was gifted with a clutch attack when England’s Luke McShane, at short notice, made a fatal knight exchange in move 36, which turned the game into a draw. Hans Niemann was also thwarted in the sixth round, as the 20-year-old US grandmaster mishandled Berlin’s Ruy Lopez and was beaten well by Ukrainian Andrei Volokitin.
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The Classic, characterized by fighting chess, tight games, and unforced errors, now looks set for Adams, the oldest competitor. Cornish, known as “the spider”, has retained his own subtle strategic style. He has the blanks in his next two matches, followed by a pairing against Shreyas Royal, 14, in Sunday’s final.
If Adams slips up, Gukesh will have the chance to score the tournament win he needs to take the lead on the Fide Circuit, whose winner qualifies for the world Candidates title in April 2024.
The leaders after round six were Adams (England) 4.5, Gukesh (India) 4, Amin Tabatabaei (Iran) 3.5, Niemann (US), Mateusz Bartel (Poland), Volokitin (Ukraine), and Moussard (The France) 3.
Earlier, Gukesh dropped a full point when he blundered against Moussard with 26 Rd2 ?? (26 Qd4!) allowing the winning counter 26…Bxa3!
Niemann came to London straight from the best result of his career at Zagreb. The US 20-year-old scored brilliancy against Royal, sacrificing knight then the two rooks for a coupling attack, but generally chose a quieter approach than in Croatia.
There was a Christmas party after round four, where Niemann and Tabatabaei, No. 2 of Iran, bullet games one minute before they left together, obviously his best friends. Pairing up the next day, they hit a known and likely pre-arranged draw line, ending with more time on the clocks than they started (due to increments per shift).
Royal needed a score of 4/9 for GM norm, and he seemed to achieve it when he won a fine strategic game against Tabatabaei. The lack of experience told against the 14-year-old in later rounds.
Meanwhile, what news about Magnus Carlsen? The world No. 1 Norway’s title on the line for the Tour of Champions across the board in Toronto from Saturday until December 16. Carlsen’s seven competitors for the $500,000 prize fund are led by world No. 2 and 3, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, and they also include Wesley So, Alireza Firouzja, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and Nodirbek Abdusattorov.
After Toronto, Carlsen will head to Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where he will defend his World Rapid and World Blitz titles between December 26 and 31
This week, the No. 1 is warming up for Toronto. Carlsen won Tuesday’s Title with a near-perfect 10.5/11, conceding a single lead to Firouzja. On Wednesday, he broke Nakamura’s recent mark of 3332 for the highest rating ever recorded on the chess.com site by reaching 3340.
Two schoolgirls took first place in the UK Women’s Blitz Championship at Leamington Spa last weekend. Elis Dicen, 13, took the title on a tiebreaker from Bodhana Sivanandan, eight. Both scored 11/14, but Dicen won their singles match, one of the best in the tournament. It was a 3+2 blitz: three minutes per player for the entire game, plus two seconds added per transition.
The pair finished ahead of seasoned international opposition from 2019 world girls’ under-18 blitz champion Kamila Hryshchenko and former women’s champion in Moscow. Elmira Mirzoeva, who was fourth and fifth. It was a double success for Sivanandan, who finished second to Mirzoeva last year and shared the 2022 England championship. All 15 competitors had been first or second in previous regional qualifiers.
The two English girls have made rapid progress recently. Dicen won her open in the final of the Delancey UK Schools Challenge at Blenheim Palace, the only girl in the competition’s history to do so ahead of all the boys, while Sivanandan made a clean sweep of 33/33 in the world under eight classic, fast. and blitz championships, scoring an impressive 7/11 against much higher rated male experts in Riga, Latvia.
More than twenty years after the vintage years when the trio of Harriet Hunt, Ruth Sheldon and Jovanka Houska won world or European titles at under-18 or under-20 level, the future looks bright again for women’s and girls’ chess. English. British women’s champion Lan Yao, 22, is a rising star in the international game.
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At junior level, the work of She Plays to Win, under the leadership of England women’s coach, IM Lorin d’Costa, is bearing fruit. She Plays to Win aims to attract more girls to the game through an all-female online competition and weekly Sunday simulations in London by French multi-champion Sophie Milliet.
Women’s chess in England is already young. More than half of Fide’s top 50 rated women were born in 2000 or later in England, compared to 12% of men. The English Chess Federation and its women’s chess director, Aga Milewska, are encouraging rising players with the help of chess charities and the new £500,000 grant from the government.
Internationally, England’s women are ranked 20th behind top western European nations France and Germany as well as world leaders China and India, but results are set to improve as Sivanandan’s commitment also like a new generation of talented teenagers.
As well as Dicen and Sivanandan, the ranking trajectories Eugenia Karas, 15, Abigail Weersing, 17, Nina Pert, 15, Anusha Subramanian, 14, and Tashika Arora, 15, all show potential to make the England women’s team in the coming years is ahead of us. .
3897: 1 rxb7! Qxb7 2 Qf6+ Kg4 3 Qe6+ Kh5 4 Qxg8 Rg7 (Qg7 is longer) 5 Qf8 d4 6 e6 c5 7 Qxg7! and Black gave up (Qxg7 8 e7 and queen).
