Bengaluru: Four rounds into the Candidates tournament, a 20-year-old has cruised into the sole lead, a full point ahead of the rest of the field. A day after defeating R Praggnanandhaa with the Black pieces, Uzbekistan’s Javokhir Sindarov crushed world No 3 Fabiano Caruana.
He out-prepared and out-played Caruana, which isn’t easy, and now has three wins from four rounds. While Praggnanandhaa may not have minded a quiet 37-move draw against Matthias Bluebaum after a bruising loss to Sindarov in Round 3, the tournament heads into its first rest day on Thursday. For Bluebaum, it’s a fourth draw in as many rounds. Both he and Praggnanandhaa are now at two points.
Sindarov has shown great tenacity, consistency and preparation and is easily the most impressive player of the tournament so far. He broke into a boyish grin when asked about his rampaging form.
“I never imagined I’ll go into the rest day with a plus three score. I played really well and my preparation was also fantastic, thanks to my team of seconds. Preparing against Fabi is a big problem because he knows all the lines and can play any move. So, to out-prepare him feels really, really good. Actually, ten minutes before the game I repeated this line and it ended up happening in the game,” he told Chess.com.
Playing White, Caruana chose the Queen’s pawn opening and the Queen’s Gambit Accepted set-up was soon on the board. Out-prepared by the youngster, Caruana began to fall dangerously behind on the clock, leaving him with only six minutes for 20 moves at one point. Caruana using up almost all his time early caused Sindarov to rethink his plans. “At some point today, I thought I’ll play solid and not push too much,” Sindarov said, “but when he began to think too much I thought ‘OK I’ll do something’. And it worked.”
For 33-year-old Caruana, now playing his sixth Candidates and almost synonymous with the tournament itself, this is a World Championship shot he cannot afford to squander. He won the Candidates eight years ago and went on to face Magnus Carlsen in the title match. He lost after a close, fierce battle which went into tiebreaks.
The landscape of chess, however, is vastly different today. Carlsen has stepped away from the World Championship cycle, and a wave of young firebrand players has arrived on the scene, unleashing fearless, disruptive chess. One among those young, ambitious players is Sindarov. It’s still early days in the tournament but it’s likely he could be the one sitting across from Gukesh in the World Championship match later this year.
It’s the thing Praggnanandhaa is chasing too. He still has some catching up to do on the standings first. On Wednesday, playing with White, Bluebaum opened with the Queen’s pawn opening and the Indian responded by closing his eyes to meditate for a quick minute before picking the Semi-Slav. He attempted to stir things with a center break but couldn’t drum up enough play to keep things interesting and Bluebaum managed to steer it to a draw.
Praggnanandhaa’s and Bluebaum’s journeys in chess have been starkly different. While Praggnanandhaa was a prodigious talent, smashing the world record to become the youngest International Master at 10 years and a Grandmaster at 12, Bluebaum didn’t dream of becoming a professional chess player as a child. He was coached by his father (rated 2200) and briefly took lessons from a coach when he was young. Up until he qualified for the Candidates, Bluebaum didn’t have a coach or second. He had been working on his chess and preparing for tournaments by himself.
“I like clicking through the lines and seeing them myself. It also helps me understand them a bit more,” he told Chessbase India after finishing runners-up in the Grand Swiss tournament last year, which fetched him a spot in the Candidates. A surprise qualifier for the tournament, Bluebaum named his Twitch channel ‘KeinSehrStarkerSpieler’ (which translates to – not a very good chess player), a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Grandmaster’s remark about him.
It wasn’t a great day for Indian players in the women’s section either. Divya Deshmukh suffered her first loss of the tournament to top seed Zhu Jiner while Vaishali chose to settle for a draw against Aleksandra Goryachkina in a slightly better position. Divya, playing White, had the doubled pawns in the centre and seemed to have messed up the follow-up. She made a few questionable choices like pushing her kingside pawns, and not castling on the Queenside.
At one point, Divya’s baffling choice of moves and White’s unpleasant position caused the baffled five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand to wonder aloud on the broadcast stream: “Is there any good square for White?”
