Round 4 playoff: (bold = lower rated)
| 1 | 1-1 | Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime (FRA) | – | Gelfand, Boris (ISR) |
| 2 | 1-1 | Caruana, Fabiano (ITA) | – |
Gashimov, Vugar (AZE) |
| 6 | 1-1 | So, Wesley (PHI) | – | Malakhov, Vladimir (RUS) |
| 7 | 1-1 | Bacrot, Etienne (FRA) | – | Ponomariov, Ruslan (UKR) |
| 8 | 1-1 | Jakovenko, Dmitry (RUS) | – | Grischuk, Alexander (RUS) |
What is your prediction? Which 5 will move on to the quarterfinals?
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
So So So.
Gelfand, Caruana, So, Ponomariov, Grischuk
Good luck Wesley! All the best…
While watching the So and the Caruana games..I could not believe to my horror both players made errors at the same time in promising positions. Hopefully they can hold the draw.
No…say it aint SO. Okay I am watching both the Caruana and So games. Promising positions both. Then, unexplicably, almost at the same time they make critical errors. Watching the So game I am thinking Rff8 not Raf8…must be a transmission error. Horrors it isnt. Caruana the position was clearly in his favor block E pawn pile up on and the point would just drop in his lap like the proverbial fruit. But noooooooo he had to sacrifice. Aggggrrrh. Okay they will be back and have proven their mettle.
Wesley,
you can go… all….the…way!!
so is out,malakhov just beat him…
The young phenoms are showing their inexperience.
They will be back and become 2700 superstars too.
We wish them – Wesley and Fabio, the best.
oh well, it was good while it lasted, come back stronger next time and congratulations to those who advanced to the next round.
-Donnie
A little bit of retrospection would show that Malakhov was likely to beat (and he did beat) Wesley So in the rapid tiebreak games. The odds were stacked heavily against Wesley.
Malakhov has a sterling record in the rapid tiebreak.
In Round 2, after a draw in the first game, he won the next two against Israel’s Ilia Smirin (rating 2662; rank 43) and he advanced to the third round.
In Round 3, he won three straight games against Ukraine’s Pavel Eljanov (2729; rank 11) and advanced to the fourth round.
In Round 4, as it is now history, he won three straight games against the 2009 World Cup rising star Wesley So (2640; rank 59).
That’s 8.5 points out of 9 games in rapid format! This is one phenomenal and outstanding performance.
In the meantime, Malakhov needed no tiebreak against Peter Svidler as he won the mini-match, 1.5-0.5. (Svidler probably thought Malakhov is unbeatable in rapid and went just one game down in the classical format.)
–TCC