Hikaru Nakamura is the King of Grand Chess Tour Paris 2016

Chessbase reports:

Hikaru Nakamura convincingly won the Grand Chess Tour Paris. After a shaky start into the second day of the blitz tournament he started to win game after game. World Champion Magnus Carlsen, however, failed to find his form and lost one game after the other. After 16 of 18 rounds Nakamura was 2.5 points ahead and had won the tournament with two rounds to go.

Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura finished both with 11.5 points in their 18 blitz games. Interesting to note, though, that in their match-up, Carlsen won both games.

Wesley So started to pick up and win more games in the last eight rounds with a score of 5.5/8, but it was not enough to help his campaign when he scored 3 points only in the first 10 rounds. Thus, he just settled in the 7th place in the blitz leg and 4th overall.

Final blitz crosstable follows: 

Grand Chess Tour Paris 2016 Blitz Day 1 Results and Standings

After the first round robin blitz games (9 games), Carlsen led with 7 points, ahead of Nakamura by half a point. See standings below:

# Name Pts SB
1 Carlsen, Magnus 7.0 30.25
2 Nakamura, Hikaru 6.5 24.50
3 Caruana, Fabiano 5.5 20.00
4 Aronian, Levon 5.0 20.50
5 Vachier-Lagrave, Maxime 4.5 20.50
Kramnik, Vladimir 4.5 16.50
Giri, Anish 4.5 15.25
8 So, Wesley 3.0 12.75
9 Topalov, Veselin 2.5 11.75
10 Fressinet, Laurent 2.0 6.50

Replay the games played so far (Rounds 1-9 of Blitz games): Grand Chess Tour Paris 2016 – Blitz Round.

Blitz games Day 2

The countdown is done. You may catch the games LIVE: Grand Chess Tour Paris 2016 Blitz Games

Photo courtesy of the Grand Chess Tour.

Wesley So beats Magnus Carlsen in Grand Chess Tour Paris 2016 — Rapid Round 1

The Grand Chess Tour 2016 has started, and first stop was Paris, France. The Paris leg is composed of 10-player Round Robin Rapid and 10-player Double Round Robin Blitz games. Check out results and standings of the tournament.

What made this tournament really exciting is that right at the start of the tournament, in round 1 of the rapid games, GM Wesley So defeated the World Champion Magnus Carlsen.

Chessbase reports:

World Champion Magnus Carlsen is top favorite in Paris but the tournament did not start well for him. In the first round Carlsen played with White against Wesley So and with bold and creative play the World Champion reached a completely winning position in which he had two queens against queen and knight. But then he could not make up his mind which winning move he should play and lost on time – a bitter loss particularly so because the rapid games are played with a time-limit of 25 minutes for the whole game and a 10-second increment per move.

Apparently, Carlsen was winning the Rapid Round 1 game but lost on time.

Check out the game below. Also, you may also replay all round 1 games.