Nepomniachtchi hits 2792 after his 5th win at the 2022 Candidates
Round 11 of the 2022 Candidates Tournament ended with Nepomniachtchi winning his 5th game, this time against Firouzja, and leading the tournament with 8/11, 1,5 points ahead from Ding Liren who won against Caruana.
Real Madrid legendary footballer Predrag Mijatovic, the only scorer in the 1998 UEFA Champions League final against Juventus, made the ceremonial first move today, in the most anticipated game of the day between Firouzja and Nepomniachtchi.
According to the Zugzwang blog Firouzja played 268 games the night before this game! Lichess provided the information that Firouzja has been playing bullet-rhythm games during the early morning of June 30 until around 5 in the morning (Spanish time)
After this sleepless night, Firouzja has gone for a Petroff sideline and an overoptimistic plan for the middle game against Nepo. After pushing his castling pawns for a king-side attack, he put himself in great danger.
Nepo didn’t hesitate to attack back and sacrificed a piece to gain a bigger advantage. Eventually the Russian GM found the right moves for Firouzja to resign. Nepomniachtchi not only won his 5th game at the Candidates but he crossed his peak rating of 2792 on the live rating list and now leads the tournament with the impressive 8/11 score.
The first result of the day was Radjabov-Duda. The game ended in an uneventful draw by repetition after 33 moves to finish the day with 5 and 4.5 points, respectively. The Nakamura-Rapport game was also a balanced one with the American GM pushing to get more out of his knight-2 pawns against bishop-1 pawn endgame to end the game in a draw.
The last game to end was Caruana-Ding Liren. After a complicated game, with lots of engine ups and downs, Ding Liren managed to win against Caruana and climb to the 2nd place, 1,5 points away from Nepomniachtchi.
Join our broadcast with GM Daniil Yuffa and WIM Jesse February, tomorrow at 13:00 UTC.
Round 12 Pairings:
Richard Rapport – Fabiano Caruana
Ding Liren – Teimour Radjabov
Jan-Krzysztof Duda – Alireza Firouzja
Ian Nepomniachtchi – Hikaru Nakamura
