Aleksandra Goryachkina won the figure prize

The most significant victory for Russian chess this year was brought by Alexandra Goryachkina. She won the World Cup held in Baku, beating the main sensation of the tournament in the final on a tie-break – Bulgarian Nurgyul Salimova, who was not highly rated before its start, but showed surprisingly sharp play.

The Baku World Cup finally adorned the career of Alexandra Goryachkina with a very valuable prize, which she terribly lacked. Goryachkina is 24 years old, and for several years, since her teenage years, she has been in the chess elite, and recently even in the cream of this elite. But with some really loud breakthrough, she didn’t grow together in any way, although twice he was insanely close. In 2020, Goryachkina won the right to play in the match for the world champion title with its owner, Chinese Ju Wenjun. The rivals fought on equal terms, and the Russian woman did not manage in the tie-break. In 2021, the International Chess Federation (FIDE) for the first time added a women’s World Cup to the already familiar and popular men’s World Cup. And Goryachkina could well go down in history in Sochi as the first owner of this trophy. However, in the final, she was again upset by a slightly more seasoned opponent: this time – compatriot Alexandra Kosteniuk, now playing for Switzerland. Goryachkina did not miss the Baku chance.

Her success may seem rather routine. After all, we are talking about the gold rating favorite. That is, formally, it was not Goryachkina, but Ju Wenjun, who was seeded one line above. But here it should be taken into account that the Chinese woman arrived in Baku almost immediately after her championship match, which ended at the end of July, in which she defeated another representative of China, Lei Tingjie. Champions usually take a cooldown in these situations. So no one was particularly surprised that Ju Wenjun retired in the fourth round after colliding with Germany’s Elisabeth Petz. But in fact, there was nothing routine in the triumph of Alexandra Goryachkina – at least because of the final match.

The past two or three seasons have given chess a whole scattering of young talents either ripening for great achievements or even already ripe for them. But the rise of Nurgul Salimova is perhaps too prominent on this list.

Before the Baku World Cup, 20-year-old Salimova was hardly taken seriously by anyone – because of her modest background, because of her low rating: 2405 is one and a half hundred points less than, for example, Goryachkina. But located in the tail of the top thirty sowings, the Bulgarian went round after round.

The knockout system, according to which the World Cup is held, implies an abundance of all sorts of crazy surprises. But the case of Salimova was too special.

Strong rivals, like the Russians Polina Shuvalova and the Ukrainian Anna Muzychuk, who she got in the quarterfinals and semifinals, she threw out not on luck, not on other people’s mistakes that the favorite could not correct, but thanks to her own style. It was amazing for the modern era, which puts at the forefront a theory verified by computer analysis, chess is extremely “human”, or something. In them, sharpness came to the fore, sometimes a pure bluff, when an opponent is frightened in reality by an incorrect victim, and she, stunned by it, suddenly begins to fake. The great eighth world champion Mikhail Tal once played such chess, and looking at the games played by Salimova, one could think that she studied exclusively from his work.

By the end, Nurgul Salimova’s audacity and luck had already made such a powerful impression that it was even somehow strange to label her as an outsider. In the end, since Muzychuk, a brilliant connoisseur of openings and various cunning variations, seemed to be doing everything right anyway, running into Salimova’s blows, then why should they be harmless to Goryachkina?

It was really difficult for the Russian woman. On the second day of the “classic” part of the final, Nurgyul Salimova played white, betting on aggression again, and achieved a colossal two-pawn material advantage. And then the famous technique of Goryachkina turned on. Salimova, who had just been close to victory, suddenly discovered that with the most precise moves all the extra material had been eaten away from her and she had to not screw it up herself in order to maintain equality.

The tie-break was no less entertaining. It opened with a game of rapid chess, in which Aleksandra Goryachkina fought back with Black. In the second, she already had white pieces, but everything went to the point that the matter would not be limited to this duel, a continuation with even tighter control would be needed. In the endgame, Salimova ended up with a pawn down, one against two. But this single pawn, together with the bishop and the king, placed such a dense barrier in the path of Goryachkina’s soldered tandem that a draw looked inevitable. Well, it was impossible to understand how to break through here.

And Alexandra Goryachkina, instead of agreeing to peace, in the conditions of time trouble, all the time threatening to evaporate seconds, maneuvered and maneuvered the knight and the king. And it was already similar to the game of the modern chess king – the first number of the men’s rating Magnus Carlsen, who in “dead” endings, due to patience and an incredible depth of understanding of various strategic nuances invisible to the rest, often puts pressure on opponents who already think that they have escaped. Something in this spirit happened in the decisive game of the Baku World Cup. Goryachkina’s pawns, which had just frozen, suddenly began to move, ran forward, and on the 105th move, Salimova, seeing that they could no longer be stopped, resigned, content with silver and the prize-winner’s ticket to the candidate tournament: in it, in 2024, a contender for the title will be determined world champions.

The men’s chess frontman Magnus Carlsen will have to fight in the men’s final in the coming days. The Norwegian himself in the semi-final confrontation quite easily dealt with the Azerbaijani grandmaster Nijat Abasov. But in another pair, a protracted tie-break was needed to determine the winner. And on it, the Indian child prodigy Rameshbabu Pragnanandha, who turned 18 two weeks ago, nevertheless crushed the famous American Fabiano Caruana, singing another verse of the anthem of youth, already familiar in chess.

Alexey Dospekhov