John Saunders reports: The 2018 Chess.com Isle of Man International started on Saturday 20 October at the Villa Marina, Douglas, with the traditional, FIDE-approved first round in which the much higher rated players massacred the much lower rated ones. That’s it, nothing more to see here, folks, come back tomorrow when we won’t have quite so many mismatches to report. Well, OK, I exaggerate… there was still plenty of great action to report, even though those rotters at FIDE spoilt our fun by disallowing first round pairings done by random. This year’s first round was a lot of fun anyway, thanks to the fact that the tournament is so super-mega-strong that many of those aforementioned much lower rated players are great players in their own right with an incredible chess CV to match.
Chief Minister Howard Quayle MHK, who opened the congress, makes the ceremonial first move for Levon Aronian (photo: Chess.com/Maria Emelianova)
HOUSE RULES
If you run your eye down the first round pairings, you’ll notice that the rating differential was around the 300 mark. As most competition players will appreciate, that is a fearfully large margin to bridge. Most of the time when you play someone rated 300 points higher than you, you’ve got as much chance of surviving as those 300 Spartans who lined up against myriads of Persians at Thermopylae. Not many of us have turned around such a big gap and won against the odds, though we might look back on a few proud moments when we emerged with a draw. That was pretty much the story of the round. There were 82 games played and you have to journey all the way down to board 68 to find a game where the little guy beat the big guy. Only one player managed it. So the David versus Goliath award goes to FM Glenn House of England (rule Britannia!), rated 2180, who beat Indian GM Sunil Dhopade Swapnil, rated 2493. It was also a blow for the old-timers, with Glenn aged 55 to Sunil’s 28, so I’m also nominating Glenn House as the first candidate for the Tarjan Trophy which I have just conjured up out of my fevered imagination to be awarded to players aged over 50 who knock over much higher rated GMs. (Anyone not knowing why I have named this after US GM Jim Tarjan simply hasn’t been paying enough attention to the reports of last year’s competition). Glenn probably won’t be impressed with these nominations for wholly imaginary awards but rather more focused on his round two pairing with Anish Giri.
Here’s the game. I’m slightly at a loss as to why the GM should have come unstuck here. His dodgy opening play looks inexplicable and left him with nothing for a pawn. A desperate attempt to find a tactical trick nearly worked but the white player ultimately had it all under control.
Higher up the pairings there was another game which for a time looked like being one of the most newsworthy upsets of all time. Vishy Anand found himself playing Black against 12-year-old Raunak Sadhwani, one of the growing number of brilliant Indian youngsters who have appeared on the scene in his wake. If you think about it, it was his own fault. As it says in the Bible, “for they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”: if he hadn’t been quite so amazingly successful at chess, there wouldn’t have been all these Vishy wannabees eager to push him off his pedestal.
Most of us will already be familiar with Praggnanandhaa and Sarin, but Raunak Sadhwani is a new name to most of us. He qualified for the IM title a few months ago and if you cast around the internet, you’ll find he already has a few GM scalps to his name. He comes from Nagpur in Maharashtra. Though he finally came unstuck against Vishy today, it was a brave effort and will garner him a lot of attention in the chess world.
Vishy Anand was given a tough first-round work-out by 12-year-old Raunak Sadhwani (photo: John Saunders)
Elsewhere, there were a lot of games where the meek didn’t exactly inherit the earth but were rewarded with a valuable half-share in it. Just looking at the top 20 boards, where players rated 2700+ faced opponents rated between 2448 and 2402, the super-GMs recorded 11 wins and 9 draws. I haven’t troubled to do the rating arithmetic but that looks like a reasonable haul of half-points for the lesser rated players.
Batkhuyag Munguntuul drew with super-GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek in Round 1 (photo: John Saunders)
Anish Giri was the highest rated of the elite players who conceded a first-round draw. He could make no impression on Alina Kashlinskaya. The latter’s husband Radoslaw Wojtaszek also had to settle for a draw against Mongolian IM Batkhuyag Munguntuul, whose difficult-to-spell name I’m going to have to enter into my auto-correct dictionary if she is going to persist with these excellent performances. Another female player on the top 20 boards, IM Irina Bulmaga from Romania, drew with Hungarian GM Zoltan Almasi.
Vladimir Kramnik’s first-round troubles continued but were only half as bad as last year (photo: John Saunders)
Vlad Kramnik has a problem with the first round in the Isle of Man. Last year his big mistake lay in pulling Fabiano Caruana’s name out of the tombola machine. This year he could blame the pairing system as it paired him with an underrated Indian GM, Kidambi Sundararajan. The former world champion huffed and puffed for many long hours before conceding the draw.
In the absence of Fabiano Caruana, the best chance of a US success in the Chess.com event would seem to lie with Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura but neither of them could do better than draw their first round games against a pair of IMs; CRG Krishna of India, and Paolo Ladron de Guevara of Spain respectively.
Hikaru Nakamura is an open-tournament specialist but he was well held by Paolo Ladron de Guevara of Spain (photo: John Saunders)
Three of England’s GMs who did so well at the recent Olympiad were unable to summon the form they showed in Batumi in the first round. Mickey Adams, David Howell and Gawain Jones all conceded draws, and it was left to the nation’s newly-minted FIDE Vice-President, Nigel Short, to score a win. A couple of other English GMs, Danny Gormally and Simon Williams, also scored full points.
Last year’s co-commentator GM Simon Williams is back at the board in 2018, starting with a win (photo: John Saunders)
Don’t forget to tune in tomorrow, when the rating gap seems to be narrowing to around 200 points. Some mouth-watering pairings, particularly of the elite versus prodigy variety, e.g. Peter Leko vs Praggnanandhaa and Wang Hao vs Nihal Sarin.
