Saturday 23 July 2016

Carlsen equalises

After 5 years of head to head chess, Magnus Carlsen has brought his lifetime score 'Classical' games against Anish Giri up to 1 each (with a bag load of draws). Having first played in 2011 (with a win to Giri), Carlsen has been unable to grab that revenge victory, until yesterday.
In the 9th round of the Bilbao Masters, Carlsen opened with the London System, and although the opening did not seem the give him much, he did get some play on the kingside. Giri however defended his position, and Carlsen even missed a change to win material. But a mistake on move 37 by the out of form Giri gave Carlsen a second chance and he took it.
The win also gave Carlsen an insurmountable lead in the tournament as unsurprisingly, the other two games were drawn.


Carlsen,Magnus (2855) - Giri,Anish (2785) [D00]
9th Masters Final 2016 Bilbao ESP (9.2), 22.07.2016



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

40/90 with no increment is not "classical" in my book.
Good job by Carlsen to extend it even further, by exiting book at move 2, meaning Giri had to find 38 moves in 90 minutes, compared to more like 25-30 on average in 110-120 minutes in true classical.

Lionel said...

So you are saying that Giri had to make 0.42 moves/minute until move 40, when usually he would only have 0.21-0.27 moves/minute to make, meaning he was playing 65-100% faster?

Finish is Qxe5, Nf6+ Kg7, Qd7+ and Kh6 is forked by Nf7+ but Kf6 and Nh7# is mate!