Nakamura wins, Anand second in Zurich
The 2016 Zurich Chess Challenge was almost a repeat of the event last year. There was a tie for the first place and that too between the same players, Hikaru Nakamura of the US and Viswanathan Anand of India. And like last year, Nakamura scored over in tiebreaks but not through an Armageddon sudden-death game. The usual SB tiebreak was applied and Anand felt the fate had been cruel to him.
By : migrator
Update: 2016-02-16 19:34 GMT
Chennai
The arbiters took the cumulative SB tiebreak (rapid and blitz combined), which allowed Nakamura to keep the trophy by one point.
“You should let me have this one after last year,” Anand joked to Nakamura as they exited the playing room.
Anand and Nakamura seemed destined to end this way. They finished one-two in the opening blitz, both scored seven points in the rapid, and both earned 3.5/5 in the final blitz. Neither man lost a game among those that counted for the final standings. But in the blitz, Nakamura had a one-point advantage in the tiebreakers.
Before the final round, all three leaders still had chances to win the competition: Anand was leading with 10 points, followed by Nakamura with 9,5 and Kramnik a point behind. The pairings of the last round were Kramnik - Anand and Nakamura - Aronian, so even Kramnik had chances to win if he beat Anand and Nakamura didn’t win against Aronian.
By choosing a slow King’s Indian setup with white, Kramnik tried to keep the game going and hoping to lure Anand into making a blunder, but the Indian player didn’t do him this favour and instead took over the initiative, but it wasn’t enough to seriously shake Kramnik’s position and so a draw was agreed.
Meanwhile, Giri mated Shirov - a seemingly unimportant result, as they both were at the bottom of the table. However, as Nakamura had won against Giri and drawn with Shirov, while Anand had scored opposite, a win against Giri was now worth 2 points more than a win against Shirov. Therefore, if Nakamura scored a full point versus Aronian, he would be the winner of the competition!
Showing excellent nerves and demonstrating brilliant endgame technique even under enormous pressure, this is exactly what the American did. In a double rook endgame, he converted his extra pawn with the precision of a machine. Being two rooks down and with his two connected passed pawns being caught, Aronian stopped the clock and congratulated the American for his second successive win in Zurich.
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