Things aren’t going as planned for Kasparov. He keeps getting good positions, but his hands are shaking. He thought he would mate Navara but blundered a simple tactic and he allowed his king to be cut from the 5th rank by Caruana.

Kasparov is back! What is his approach? His approach is to play it safe. In the first game we saw the Qc2-Nimzo, where black has easy equality. In the second game he chose the Grünfeld, which is at least an invitation to a forced draw and in the third game he played strip-chess and took everything off.

While it may have looked like a brilliant concept by MVL in the Berlin, it was actually a novelty by Karjakin that led to this forced draw in the endgame where white has to be precise in order to hold.

This shows how fast modern theory develops. Two days later they all come up with the same antidote: b7-b5! This works after white has castled, because taking twice on b5 can be answered with Bxf2+.

This line causes trouble for black, because neither the Berlin nor the Marshall Attack work against it. Note: After 13. Bc2, it’s pretty much a Ruy Lopez with a black bishop on a7 and the queenside restricted.

This game is somewhat typical, because Moro is the favorite and supposed to play for a win. Hou plays a sideline, which seems to provide him with the opportunity, but things didn’t work out in the end. The piece sacrifice is actually the move with the highest engine evaluation, but the whole concept looks dubious to me. Black can defend with the same amount of pieces that white can attack with and I don’t see him grabbing two more pawns in order to restore material equality. Well, at least he managed to grab one.

Update: She also beat big guns like Navara and Bacrot to win the tournament. Nice!

They arrange a 4-game-match between Grischuk (2761) und Yu (2753) with a price guarantee of 20.000 USD for the winner and 10.000 USD for the loser, fly Grischuk all the way to China, and then we see draws like this one:

If both players want to go to the tie-break anyways, why not simply start with it? You could even skip the rest day.

What to do when you are facing a Drawmeister? Kramnik took a risk and deviated, but in the end there was no escape. That’s the reason why Carlsen plays sidelines and gives his opponent something like 0.20 pawn-units for free in order to get a live position.

When you are +2 after 3 rounds, it’s time to take a few days off.