The 13th round of the FIDE World Candidates Tournament 2016 was held today at the DI Telegraph in Moscow, Russia. Karjakin and Caruana enter the last round with 7,5/13 points each.
Despite playing white pieces Veselin Topalov run into early trouble against Hikaru Nakamura. The American weakened opponent’s pawn structure and penetrated with both rooks to the second rank. Nearing the time control black won a pawn and then imposed the decisive blow with the knight. White resigned on move 40.
Anish Giri confirmed Nakamura’s evaluation that he is in great shape, easily equalising with black against the winner of previous Candidates Tournament Viswanathan Anand. Then when the opportunity presented itself, Giri sacrificed a bishop for attack, and after many transformations around the time control black emerged with R+2P vs B+N. White, however, pinned the black pieces to f7-pawn and it was not possible to make progress for either side. Draw agreed on move 52.
Levon Aronian and Sergey Karjakin played a popular line of the English Opening – The Sicilian Dragon Reversed. Big complications ensued when Karjakin grabbed the a3-pawn. The resulting ending saw black holding B+2P vs B+N. For more than 50 moves Aronian trying to make something out of the position, but black’s far-advanced a-pawn was a too big of distraction. The game was drawn after 101 moves of play.
Peter Svidler handled the black side of the Ruy Lopez pretty well and even obtained slight advantage in the game against Fabiano Caruana. But a mistake on move 34 put black on defensive for the rest of the day. Transposing to the R+B ending white managed to win a pawn. Svidler decided it was best to eliminate all the pawns and defend the notorious R+B vs R ending. The Russian demonstrated the proper 2nd-rank defence to hold the draw after seven and a half hours and 116 moves of play.
Round 13 results:
Caruana – Svidler 1/2
Aronian – Karjakin 1/2
Topalov – Nakamura 0-1
Anand – Giri 1/2
After thirteen rounds of play Karjakin and Caruana are joint leaders with 7,5 points each. Anand is clear third with 7 points. There follow Aronian, Giri, Svidler and Nakamura (6,5) and Topalov with 4 points.
The last round games are on schedule for 28th March at 15:00 Moscow time:
Svidler – Anand
Giri – Topalov
Nakamura – Aronian
Karjakin – Caruana
Tie-breaks (Important): If Caruana, Karjakin and Anand share the first place – Caruana qualifies on the best tie-break. If Caruana and Karjakin share the first place – Karjakin qualifies.
No matter who wins, picking a challenger on tiebreak is totally inane. They can’t be bothered to have even a few Rapids games so that the challenger will win his spot over the board. And this will be the second time it’s happened in three tournaments. In the old days, tiebreaks weren’t even considered good enough to assign interzonal spots.
It’s nice that the screwy tiebreak rules weren’t actually applied this time, but their existence still skewed the results of the last round. When have we ever seen a situation before where neither player knew which one of them had to play for a win until the game was half over?