Champs: Wei Yi, Yu Yangyi and Lu Shanglei

3-Way tie for 1st place!

A very exciting finish in the last round earlier today! Both Wei Yi and Lu Shanglei won their respective games (with the Black pieces!) and caught up to the tournament leader Yu Yangyi, who could not do more than a draw despite having a very promising game at one point. All three finished with 8 points from 11 games, a full 2 points ahead of 4th place finisher Ju Wenjun, the current Women’s World Champion.

In the Women’s Championship top rated Tan Zhongyi won, also with 8 points from 11 games, but a mere half point ahead of the field.  Even so, Tan’s final result was well deserved.

Knight-pair dominates Bishop-pair!

The young Chinese talent Wei Yi impressed me the most in this tournament. Had he not lost in the 9th round against Yu Yangyi then the final result would have been entirely different.  As it was, however, Wei Yi won 3 of his last 4 games, playing remarkably dynamic and creative games.

Below I analyze his 10th round game against Wen Yang.  A theoretically important game in the Spanish Opening (3…g6), I had several years ago, here on this blog,  written a theoretical article on this same variation. I will give to this blog article below Wei Yi’s game.

Wei Yi – Wen Yang
Rd.10 29.12.2020
(1-0)

Previous Theoretical Articles on this line

Today I take a brief look at a not so common move order for White against the increasingly popular 3…g6_Spanish. This gained some prominence after the just concluded Isle of Man International, when White won convincingly two games: Naiditsch vs Nakamura and Vishnu vs Sadchev.

---

You can download the file HERE

And This One:

Navara Crushes Salgado’s Spanish in 24

Yet one more theoretical duel from this weekend’s Bundesliga encounter in Berlin has produced another beautiful wipe out. This time the opening that is featured is a hot (side)line in the Spanish that I wrote about in an earlier theoretical article.

gm Navara – gm Salgado
Bundesliga 2.3.2019 (1-0)

An important game for the theory of this variation, but clearly, as indicated in the notes, the final word has not been spoken.