Saint Louis, 28 Aug: India’s Grandmasters D Gukesh and R Praggnanadhaa played out their eighth draw in as many games at the Sinquefield Cup, which is a part of the Grand Chess Tour.
\nWhile World Championship challenger Gukesh signed peace with Anish Giri of Holland in just 23 moves, Praggnanadhaa too followed suit and drew with local favourite Fabiano Caruana in 28 moves.
\nWith all the games ending in draws in the eighth round, Alireza Firouzja of France won the Grand Chess Tour with one round to spare here and became entitled to a USD 100,000 bonus after his successful stint throughout.
\nIn the eighth round, Firouzja played out the longest game that also ended peacefully after 80 moves against Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi.
\nIn the two other games of the day in the ten-player double round-robin tournament, Nodirbek Abdusattorov of Uzbekistan split the point with Ding Liren of China and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave of France drew with Wesley So of United States.
\nAlireza took his tally to an unassailable 5.5 points out of eight games and Caruana is the only player who can catch him on points table provided Alireza loses his final bout against Praggnanandhaa and the American himself beats Giri.
\nEven if he loses, Alireza will win the tour for the first time thanks to his superior points tally overall.
\n“It’s very tough to win a tour. Any tour is tough to win, but this is the strongest tour in the world. Very happy, but it’s very tiring and feeling exhausted but, I’m very happy”, Alireza noted.
\nThe third place is still shared by five players on four points apiece. They are Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Vachier-Lagrave, So and Abdusattorov.
\nNepomniachtchi and Liren come in next on 3.5 points, a half point clear of Anish Giri who is at the last spot.
\nGukesh had to work quite less out of a routine Ruy Lopez as black as Giri went for a couple of pawn grabs in the early middle game to shake hands vide repetition of moves. (PTI)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saint Louis, 28 Aug: India’s Grandmasters D Gukesh and R Praggnanadhaa played out their eighth draw in as many games at the Sinquefield Cup, which is a part of the Grand Chess Tour. While World Championship challenger Gukesh signed peace with Anish Giri of Holland in just 23 moves, Praggnanadhaa too followed suit and drew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-247335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}