Aronian wins Bilbao Masters Final

At the time, when the whole chess world seems to be waiting for the Anand-Carlsen world championship match, there are at least three major and exciting tournaments going on. The first is the Bilbao Masters Final, which just ended with Aronian as the winner. Then there's the Russian Super Final with a fierce competition between Kramnik and Svidler. And finally Bucharest with Caruana leading ahead of Ponomariov and Radjabov.

In this post, we show the two decisive games for Aronian victory. The first is a fiery game that has a rook sacrifice and Aronian surviving a devastating attack. The second is his win over the initial leader Adams also with black from an inferior position.

Carlsen winning Sinquefield Cup

Carlsen only needed a draw today against Aronian to win the first Sinquefield Cup, while Aronian had to win. While pushing hard for a win and getting a good chance towards that, Aronian lost the initiative and ended up losing. 

The interesting move was after Aronian played 30. ... Rd4 offering an exchange and Carlsen responded with the brilliant move 31. Ne1!!. Few moves later Aronian should have repeated moves and taken the draw but instead he was looking for a win, when his position was getting worse.

Sinquefield Cup

Another interesting tournament started yesterday in Saint Louis. This tournament is a round robin that brings together the top two players in the world, Carlsen and Aronian, with the top two US players, Nakamura and Kamsky. It's not very common to have players at the level of Carlsen and Aronian playing in the US.

All games so far have been exciting, although with a lot of mistakes.