Chess Badassery - Sinquefield Cup

I know there's more than a few chess players among the monkeys of WSO, so I suspect there's more than a few of you who have been following the Sinquefield Cup. For those of you that have not been following the tournament, it's been awfully entertaining even though the one guy from the US has been getting wrecked.

This is only the second year the Sinquefield Cup has occured, and in 2013, the four players involved in the tournament had an average FIDE rating of 2797, the highest rating in history. That is, until this year, where the six players have an average rating of nearly 2802! With a field consisting of Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Fabiano Carauna, Hikaru Nakamura, Veselin Topalov, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, or put another way, the #1, #2, #5, #8, and #9 in the world by FIDE rating.

The tournament has been pretty exciting so far, and it looks like Carauna is going to run away with the $100,000 in prize money.

Fabiano Caruana beat a seemingly hypnotized GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave on Wednesday, extending his winning streak to seven and continuing his incredible domination of the highest-rated tournament in history.

“It keeps getting weirder,” said the 22-year-old Italian. “I played a solid line, and then I just took over – it happened so suddenly.”

Is anyone following the tournament? As far as chess goes, it's been awfully exciting so if you haven't been following the results, I recommend you start.

9 Comments
 

^ agreed w/ the ruy lopez vs Lev. that was like perfect play and I don't know how anyone sees the knight SAC he did without a computer. He also outplayed Magnus in the opening today pretty handily and his prep is so much better than everyone else's. Normally he's a boring solid positional player but it seems like now he's just playing more than just boring e4 openings.

 
Best Response

for what it's worth, i drew to nakamura in blitz a while back....too bad i can't get an interview anywhere to save my life though--sigh

 

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