Three combative games ended in a draw in today's third round of the Pearl Spring Grand Slam tournament in Nanjing. Carlsen keeps his one-point lead ahead of Jakovenko, Radjabov and Wang Yue.

The 2nd Pearl Spring tournament takes place September 27th - October 9th in Pukou, Nanjing, China. Again it's a six-player, double round-robin with this year Veselin Topalov (2813), Magnus Carlsen (2772), Peter Leko (2762), Teimour Radjabov (2757), Dmitry Jakovenko (2742) and Wang Yue (2736) playing for a € 250,000 prize fund. The rate of play is 40 moves in 90 minutes plus 1 hour.

Round 3

Especially Wang Yue-Carlsen was a great game in today's round, and we're not sure whether it's still the Valencia vibes or not, but it reminded of a typical Karpov-Kasparov encounter, where Black sacrifices a pawn in a Grünfeld to open up diagonals, and White defends by keeping a positionally healthy position, using all the tactics available. The star move was 13...e5! - did you even put a pawn on that square where it is attacked by pawns on both d4 and f4?

It was a logical response to White's remarkable strategy of giving up the black-squared bishop for a knight on b8, followed by f2-f4, trying to cement the center - a theme known from many modern (Chebaneko) Slav games. Just when he seemed to get into big trouble, Wang Yue came up with a plan that suited his clumsy-looking piece set-up: running with the h-pawn. Continuing with active defence, the Chinese GM wonderfully held his own. Carlsen's best chance for more seems to be 27...Bf5.

Radjabov continues his attempts to gain an advantage in the Scotch ending-with-doubled-pawns-on-both-sides which has really become is personal speciality (all of his games so far in this line have been included in the viewer). Most of the time Black doesn't seem to be facing too many problems and taking his successes in the King's Indian into account, it surprises us that the Azeri grandmaster still enjoys this kind of position. Admittedly, he did seem to have a slight edge against Jakovenko today, but it wasn't much.

Another small endgame advantage was enjoyed by Veselin Topalov today, in his White game against Peter Leko. The critical position was reached on move 22, where the Bulgarian had to decide to continue adding pressure with 22.Nb4 or immediately go for an ending with a pawn up, but where Black's remaining pieces would be very active. He chose the latter, but Leko indeed held the ending relatively easily.

Games round 3

Game viewer by ChessTempo

2nd Pearl Spring (Nanjing) 2009 | Round 3 Standings

2nd Pearl Spring (Nanjing) 2009 | Schedule & results

Links

• Pearl Spring website
• Gujuan Tzu's blog
• Ye Rongguang's photo blog
• Pearl Spring games in PGN
• Women GP website
• Women GP games in PGN