6 July 2015
Fabiano Caruana Wins Sparkassen Chess Meeting
Vladimir Kramnik finishes 4th.
Traditional supertournament in Dortmund saw a donimating performance of Fabiano Caruana (2805), who scored five wins in a row and won the event by a large margin. It was a single round round robin with eight players, two of them representing Russia - Vladimir Kramnik (2783), who had won many tournaments in Dortmund in his life, and Ian Nepomniachtchi (2720), who just recently played in the Capablanca Memorial in Cuba.
Caruana drew with Nepomniachtchi in the first round, then lost a better position to Wesley So (2778) in the second, and won the rest of the games. His final result is 5.5 points, 1.5 ahead of the nearest rival and the awesome 2938 performance!
Wesley So and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu (2654) shared the second place with 4 points.
Vladimir Kramnik made only one draw in seven games. He lost as White to Naiditsch (2722) in the first round, then defeated Hou Yifan (2676) as Black in the second round, and outplayed Ian Nepomniachtchi in the third. In the 4th round Vladimir won as Black against the German Georg Meier (2654), and it looked like Kramnik is on the right track, however, he only collected 0.5/3 in the finishing rounds: White loss to Caruana, White draw with Nisipeanu, and Black loss to So. This performance cost Vladimir 7 rating points.
Ian Nepomniachtchi started in a rather uninspiring manner - three draws as White against Caruana and two lowest rated players and two Black losses to Kramnik and So. In the round 6 he managed to finally earn his only victory, defeated Naiditsch as White, and conclunded the tournament with a Black draw with Hou Yifan. His final result is mediocre - 3/7, and -5 Elo points.
Final standings
Caruana 5.5
So, Nisipeanu 4
Kramnik 3.5
Nepomniachtchi, Naiditsch 3
Hou Yifan, Meier 2.5
