CHENNAI: R Praggnanandhaa, in the words of Viswanathan Anand, produced a 'masterpiece', to take down Anish Giri in the first round of the Candidates at Cyprus on Sunday. Playing with the white pieces, the Indian ace, featuring in his second Candidates, pushed right out of the gates with the lesser-spotted 1. e4, 2 Nc3 opening. The Dutch GM responded with 1. c5, 2 d.6 and the gauntlet was immediately laid out.
Both of them got out of the opening without giving the other an inch but there was a shift of momentum towards the Indian in the middle game. The evaluation bar was level after 29 moves but Giri had spent a lot of the opening two hours in the tank as Praggnanandhaa's opening had caught him by surprise.
Even if Giri got out unscathed, he was chasing the game for a long time because of the lack of time in his clock. And he was forced to play a number of precise moves to even stand still. And the 20-year-old pressed home the advantage in the endgame with a decisive move to capture Giri's knight on the 42nd move. The other option — to move his outside pawn to h7 — was tempting but it would have been a big error. A few moves later, Giri resigned to hand his younger opponent a big win on the opening night of the tournament.
You cannot win the Candidates with a good start but you can very easily lose it with a couple of losses. That's why it was important for the Indian to seize home the initiative. He will face Wei Yi with the black pieces on Monday.
Results (Rd 1): Open: Andrey Esipenko lost to Javokhir Sindarov, Wei Yi drew with Matthias Bluebaum, R Praggnanandhaa beat Anish Giri, Hikaru Nakamura lost to Fabiano Caruana. Women: Divya Deshmukh drew Anna Muzychuk, Bibisara Assaubayeva drew with Vaishali, Kateryna Lagno drew with Aleksandra Goryachkina, Tan Zhongyi drew with Zhu Jiner.