Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Last Round Draw
Sometimes happens that two players have an irregular performance in a tournament and they met each other in the last round. Because none of them has a real chance to advance in the ranking and in order to avoid the risk of losing extra rating points, they agree to a quick draw. Today’s example suits very well for that purpose, except that the involved players had a good performance but no real chance of winning the tournament.
Today’s game corresponds to the Tata Steel Chess 2022, held in January 2022. After round 12 Magnus Carlsen secured his 8th victory in the tournament with one round to spare. It means that none of the other 13 contenders had any chance of winning the competition. Then some of them took the last round easily and went for a quick and pacific outcome. It was the case in the game Rapport-Giri. The players entered the Grunfeld defence and agreed on a draw in only 14 moves!!
Ironically, the game Karjakin-Giri had identical moves and the same outcome early in round 4 in that same tournament.
Maybe you play chess but are unable to attend a local club. If that is your case, then join our virtual Chess.com club. On our site, we regularly play online tournaments and team matches. More than 970 members enjoy that chance and new players join every week. We have new tournaments scheduled for the coming months waiting for players! Join now! Additionally, we have a puzzle section and we have recently started to practice the variant of ‘Vote Chess’. Although not very popular, ‘Vote Chess’ is an effective educational tool for learning together.
