When Arjun Erigaisi qualified for the quarter-finals of the Paris leg of the Freestyle Grand Slam Tour on Tuesday by finishing top eight in the leaderboard after 11 round-robin rapid games, it soon became certain that the player no one likes to face will be paired with him after he finished fourth. Finishing in the top half comes with its own set of benefits in this tournament. The top half gets to choose their opponents which they like to face in the quarters with one more added benefit of deciding the colour they would like to start with. But fourth place meant Arjun had to wait for the other three above him to first make their choice.
After Ian Nepomniachtchi went with an audacious choice by picking Weissenhaus leg winner Vincent Keymer, Magnus Carlsen picked Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Maxime Vachier Lagrave chose Fabiano Caruana, Arjun was left with no choice but to play Nakamura.
Arjun chose to play White against the World No.2, the only player other than Carlsen to have a live rating above 2800 in Classical chess.
The drawing lot gave the position number 841, where the bishops lie in the centre and the King is on the b file with a natural barrier.
Ahead of the round, it was Nepomniachtchi who batted for a pawn sacrifice, naming it “Nepo Gambit” in a hurdle of players with dark pieces which included Caruana, Vidit Gujrathi, Abdusattorov and Nakamura. According to the Russian, the line was almost winning for Black and after a lot of deliberation, it was Caruana and Nakamura who went with the same line to try out their luck whereas Nepomniachtchi didn’t even play his own line.
Arjun, who pushed his central pawn e4 to gain control of centres was offered a pawn sacrifice from Nakamura instantly. And just after the ninth move, where Hikaru misplaced his knight d6 while developing the minor piece — handing out a big advantage to Arjun in the opening — his accuracy dipped massively and his 89.7 accuracy was the least among all 12 players at that given point.
His heart rate also shot up to close to 100, while a composed Arjun kept his heart rate under control.
Arjun’s observation of the basic principle of chess, look for centre control, even in the freestyle variation says a lot about this format. Even though the shuffled backrank makes no room for opening theory, the basic essence of the game remains the same.
“Something I recently discovered is this: Initially, I thought in Freestyle you often need to quickly open diagonals for bishops or queens. But I have noticed centre control — like playing e4 or d4 — still matters greatly, even if these moves don’t immediately open lines. More often than not, having strong centre control turns out to be critical. So, yes, controlling the centre still matters in Freestyle,” Arjun had said ahead of the tournament.
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Even with an apparent weakness in the position after following Nepomniachtchi’s advice in the opening, Nakamura continued to grind Arjun out in the middlegame to get a time advantage. The move proved vital for the American who forced Arjun to think long for his moves. The time advantage resulted in a positional advantage for Nakamura who then had an extra pawn in the endgame. But converting a rook endgame even with an extra pawn against a player of Arjun’s calibre was never going to be an easy task for him.
From a rook endgame to a king pawn vs king endgame, Nakamura was forced to share the spoils.
A visibly frustrated Nakamura held Nepomniachtchi responsible for the pawn sacrifice line and took a dig at him by saying, “Never trust a Russian”.
“Apparently I did a good job of acting there if you think I looked happy, because for pretty much the first 1.5 hours I literally wanted to get up from my board & strangle Nepo (Nepomniachtchi) I was very unhappy with the position I had, later on it was fine but,” he said after the match.
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His past struggles at the Weissenhaus tour look over now as Nakamura feels at peace playing in this time control. “In general, you try to play along and the good thing about classical is unlike rapid and blitz, it really is going to come down to a situation where there are some crazy blunders usually whoever comes up with a better plan will win the game and so I feel much more at peace while playing slow time controls,” he said.
