Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Dramatic Endgame
The Grand Chess Tour 2023 comprised five events. Two of them with games in classical format and three with rapid time control. Warsaw hosted the first rapid & blitz event: the Superbet Warsaw Rapid & Blitz from May 21 to 24 featuring 10 top players.
The whole Chess Tour 2023 consisted of two parts: a rapid and a blitz portion. The first one with a format of a single round-robin and time control of 25 minutes with a 10-second increment from move one. The second one was a double round-robin with a time control of 5 minutes and a two-second increment from move one. The final result of the tournament was the sum of points from each section.
Winning a game in the rapid section meant 2 points. And by drawing, each player earned 1 point. In the blitz section, however, a win meant 1 point and a draw, 0,5 points.
Polish GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda and Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen took part in Warsaw and today’s game is their dramatic clash in the last round of the blitz section.
Duda won the rapid section collecting 13 points, while Carlsen finished 5th with 10 points. However, Carlsen sped up in the blitz portion. And also he had a more regular streak than Duda. In 18 games from the blitz section, Carlsen earned 14 points, while Duda 10. By round 20, Carlsen already had overtaken Duda and extended his lead to two points by round 23. But Duda reduced the gap to one point at the end of the penultimate round. The final round saw the dramatic clash of both players. Duda’s only good result for tying first was a win. For Carlsen, a win or a draw was enough to end first.
The game has 124 moves. But the drama starts on move 42, when the remaining time for each player only was about 10 seconds.
What is remarkable in this game is those players’ excellent endgame technique. In an unbalanced endgame, they kept moving their pieces to almost optimal squares, even with seconds on their clocks.
It’s worth observing that despite seconds on both clocks since move 42, the game reached 124 moves. In an interval of 82 moves in an unusual endgame, both players showed excellent technique making only 3 mistakes.
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