Aronian Wins Superbet Rapid & Blitz In Playoff
Posted on November. 15. 2019
Armenian chess star Levon Aronian on Sunday defeated Sergey Karjakin in a playoff to win the Superbet Rapid & Blitz Grand Chess Tour in Bucharest. With his victory, the Armenian grandmaster secured a spot in the London playoffs next month, Chess.com reported.
The first game in the playoff ended in a draw, and then Aronian won the second to take the Superbet Rapid & Blitz trophy home.
With or without the playoff, this result was highly disappointing for Karjakin. The Russian GM needed a clear victory in Bucharest to overtake Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in the overall standings and came incredibly close.
Aronian and Karjakin are now tied for fourth place (behind Magnus Carlsen, Ding Liren and Vachier-Lagrave) in the overall GCT standings (below), but since Aronian has one more event, he’ll surely take the fourth spot.
Viswanathan Anand came third in Bucharest and is now in sixth place in the Grand Chess Tour. With a good result on home soil in the Tata Steel event later this month in Kolkata, India, he can still make it to London.
The Superbet Rapid & Blitz is the 6th out of a total of 8 events in the 2019 Grand Chess Tour.
Seven of the twelve tour “regulars”, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian, Sergey Karjakin and Wesley So, were joined by event wild cards Vlasidlav Artemiev, Le Quang Liem and Anton Korobov.