Traps, Tricks & Mistakes: Peaceful Draw
The prestigious Tata tournament takes place in January in the city of Wijk aan Zee.
It is an annual chess event taking place since 1938 and many World Champions have played in it.
The Tata Steel 2022 was the 84th edition and was eagerly anticipated, among other reasons, because Carlsen’s opponents included Sergey Karjakin and Fabiano Caruana. They were two of his previous challengers for the World Championship.
Sergey Karjakin was the challenger in 2016, which was a hard-fought Championship. The score was level (6-6) after twelve classical games but Carlsen emerged victorious in the tie-breaks.
Karjakin and Carlsen faced in round 10 of Tata, 2022. Carlsen was leading the standings with a half-point ahead of the local player Anish Giri. Karjakin was one point behind Giri and winning against Carlsen would mean to be a half-pont to the leader. For chess fans, it was disappointing to see that game finish in a draw only after 16 moves. Anyway, the round began with a bit of suspense because when the arbiter started the clock at 14:00 local time, both players hadn’t arrived yet. Karjakin arrived a few seconds after that and Carlsen about 45 seconds later.
Commenting on the result of the game and Karjakin’s chances, Carlsen said: “It’s quite alright considering the tournament standings; I’m still gonna be at least in the shared lead after this and I’ve got a couple of white games. I didn’t really know what to expect today. I thought he would probably be relatively satisfied with the way the last few rounds had gone and maybe not risk much, but on the other hand, he could have almost caught up with the lead if he’d won, so I expected him to at least try a little bit.”
Maybe that day in Wijk aan Zee, Karjakin was not in the mood to fight for the win.
Interestingly, the same number of moves and the same final position appeared in two other previous games played by Carlsen. The first one against Kramnik in 2015 and the second against Nakamura in 2020. The difference is that those games were rapid games.
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