Monday 18 July 2016

There are draws and there are draws

At the top level of chess, the draw quotient remains quite high, despite efforts of the organsiers to encourage decisive results. Certainly the prevalence of the very short 'Grandmaster draw' has declined over the years (at least amongst Grandmasters), but points between two evenly;y matched Super GM's still seem to be split.
There are still the quick draws, with the players following some traditional drawing lines, and there are some exciting hard fought draws, where after 90 moves there are only kings left on the board. I'm sure organisers don't mind the latter as much as the former, even if the crosstable ends up looking the same.
The following game from the Bilbao Masters seems to fall somewhere between the two. It is a short game ending in repetition, but it does have some exciting tactical points. White looks to be able to win material at various points, but doing so leads to big trouble. So White avoided the traps, Black checked on c2 and d4, and the players shook hands.


Karjakin,Sergey (2773) - Nakamura,Hikaru (2787) [D37]
9th Masters Final 2016 Bilbao ESP (5.1), 17.07.2016



1 comment:

Dot.Dash- said...

Ponomariov-Caruana would fall under the "known draw" rubric.