Rating 1797 (1.5 out of 3 today)
Puzzle Rush Score 41
Daily Study Today I spent some more time doing puzzles. I had the Hikaru Nakamura Vs Ding Liren match going while I played far too much bullet…
The good news is even Hikaru Nakamura makes mistakes.
Rating 1831
Puzzle Rush Score 30
Daily Study I am still taking it fairly easy with the study this weekend. I played one blitz game and got a decent win. I watched more of the Speed Chess Championship. Hikaru Nakamura and Peter Svidler faced off against each another. Nakamura won the match (which was to be expected), but I was really impressed with the way Svidler managed to get solid positions out of the opening. Nakamura is a beast at speed chess though and rarely missed a beat. Svidler couldn’t keep up in the bullet portion of the tournament. Below are two of the games Svidler won that I was particularly impressed by.
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.
2021 GCT St Louis Rapid & Blitz Read More »