A few weeks ago Hikaru Nakamura won the GCT St Louis Rapid & Blitz tournament. Hikaru is an insane blitz player. He is great at finding solutions in fast time formats. He won the event without a single loss which is pretty incredible seeing that he played 27 rounds against some of the best players in the world. Even crazier is that his rating actually went down a little due to the number of draws he had and so he lost his number one rating spot to Magnus Carlsen who did not play in the event.
Here is a great win over Fabiano Caruana. I often reach the same position after 7… d5 and so I found it interesting to see how Hikaru responded in this game.
There were some exciting exchanges with the queens and two knights coming off the board and then Hikaru played the sophisticated 13. Nd2 which I was surprised by. The idea is to develop his knight, bringing the piece into the action and maintaining the pressure on black’s position.