Caruana, Abdusattorov, Praggnanandhaa Win To Join Leaders
No one has a perfect score after round two of the 2025 Tata Steel Chess Masters, but GMs Fabiano Caruana, Nodirbek Abdusattorov, and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu all won to join GMs Gukesh Dommaraju and Vincent Keymer in the lead on 1.5/2. There could have been more decisive action, as GM Max Warmerdam was winning against Keymer, while GM Arjun Erigaisi applied heavy pressure before making a draw against GM Anish Giri.
No fewer than seven players lead the Tata Steel Chess Challengers on 1.5/2, after GMs Frederik Svane (vs. IM Faustino Oro), Benjamin Bok (vs. GM Ediz Gurel), and Erwin l'Ami (vs. IM Irina Bulmaga) scored the day's wins.
Round three starts on Monday, January 20, at 8:00 a.m. ET/ 14:00 CET / 6:30 p.m. IST.
Masters: The Big Guns Strike
World numbers two, six, and 13 struck on another action-packed day of Tata Steel Masters action.
Tata Steel Masters: Round 2 Results
Caruana, Abdusattorov, and Praggnanandhaa caught Gukesh and Keymer in the lead, while GM Pentala Harikrishna was knocked down into the tie for sixth place.
Tata Steel Masters: Standings After Round 2
There were two relatively fast and convincing wins in round two, and they both featured a novelty (at least on the top level) on move six.
There were contrasting fortunes for the players who unleashed the new idea, though in both cases it worked out well initially.
Abdusattorov 1-0 Mendonca
Both of these players suffered disappointment in round one, with Abdusattorov missing a win against Praggnanandhaa, while GM Leon Luke Mendonca not only missed a win but then lost to Keymer. They'd also met recently, with Abdusattorov with White beating Mendonca in the final round of the 2024 Qatar Masters, after he played 6.g3 in the same French Defense position.
6.a4!? was a novelty cooked up in the laboratory of Abdusattorov's second GM Rustam Kasimdzhanov, and it shocked observers, including IM Jovanka Houska.
6.a4!? is a near-novelty by Abdusattorov, with Jovanka saying it looks like a finger-fehler for the vastly more common 6.a3: https://t.co/Ek9UrOzkpm#TataSteelChess pic.twitter.com/TnGMfYkowf
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 19, 2025
Abdusattorov explained the main idea is to support Bb5, which soon happened in the game. When Mendonca castled queenside, he was asking for trouble, and it soon followed with a whirlwind attack. That's our Game of the Day and has been analyzed by GM Rafael Leitao below.
Abdusattorov is targeting tournament victory after finishing in a four-way tie for first in 2024 but missing out in the tiebreak. When WIM Fiona Steil-Antoni asked him what that had taught him, his reply was simple: "Don't get into tiebreaks!"
Caruana 1-0 Van Foreest
Caruana justified playing the London System this way: "I wanted to get the first surprise in." However, he admitted the tables were turned when GM Jorden van Foreest came up with the new move 6...Nh6. A former colleague of Van Foreest's on Team Carlsen approved.
— Peter Heine Nielsen (@PHChess) January 19, 2025
Caruana confessed that it worked and Black was fine, but he also said he'd come to the game wanting to the push and welcomed when his opponent went for a sharp pawn sacrifice with 16...d4. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the move, but then Van Foreest miscalculated when swapping off queens, got into a tricky endgame, and sank without a trace in just a few moves.
World no. 2 Fabiano Caruana picks up his 1st win of 2024, defeating Jorden van Foreest! #TataSteelChess pic.twitter.com/4FOGSJHrnK
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 19, 2025
Caruana was asked after the game why we'd seen such crazy action on day one. He said it was partly due to the long time control, with 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes to the end of the game, plus 30 seconds added each move: "I think the time control, weirdly enough, when you have a longer time control, people take more risks at the start—they think they have enough time to manage it, and then you find out that you don’t exactly have enough time to manage it!"
When you have a longer time control, people take more risks at the start—they think they have enough time to manage it, and then you find out that you don't exactly have enough time to manage it!
—Fabiano Caruana
The third star to win was Praggnanandhaa.
Harikrishna 0-1 Praggnanandhaa
"With the positions I had, this is the most I could hope for," said Praggnanandhaa on moving to 1.5/2, since he admitted, "I had no hope at some point" of his game against Abdusattorov in round one. In round two he faced the player who had outplayed Arjun the day before, but this time it was Harikrishna who would lose after a long grind. An ambitious opening, including a pawn sacrifice on g6, had backfired for the older player, though Praggnanandhaa admitted he'd been worried:
"I was getting scared about my position because he’s just going to push the pawns and if I don’t find anything concrete, I’m just going to get mated."
Praggnanandhaa did find a good plan, though it's noteworthy that the endgame he won would have been a draw if Harikrishna had exchanged rooks, with both players overlooking that the bishop-and-pawn endgame was a fortress.
The remaining games were all drawn, but it was only GM Alexey Sarana vs. GM Wei Yi that saw no action, with Sarana ending on move 54 with more time than he began. Caruana noted that for round one he'd played the Berlin for the first time in a decade and given the Chinese star no chance, while in round two, "I felt a bit sorry for him—today he got the most boring position again!"
In two games we got to witness fantastic defense. Gukesh found himself on the ropes against GM Vladimir Fedoseev out of the opening, but displayed extreme precision to prevent the advantage growing before liquidating into a draw.
It was a similar story for Giri against Arjun, as he played the Najdorf only to stumble into a position, after 20.Qd5!, where Black was hanging by a thread.
The queen was threatening to go to b7, or the knight to c6 or e7 via d4, but Giri spent 26 minutes and found 20...Qg4!, and soon managed to swap off queens into a tough endgame that was at least not easily winnable for White.
There were twists ahead, but ultimately Arjun had to settle for a draw, with both players getting their first half-point of the 2025 edition of Tata Steel Chess.
Keymer vs. Warmerdam, meanwhile, was altogether different, with Keymer for a second day in a row finding himself completely busted mid-game, after playing the optimistic 29.Rc6?.
What helped Keymer, in the end, was the time situation—he played the move with 17 seconds to spare, and when Warmerdam replied with 29...Be3+! he had just over a minute on his clock.
In the wild scramble that followed, Keymer found enough resources to almost equalize, but then after the time control he lost control again, until Warmerdam was agonizingly close to picking up a win. He just had to push the right pawn...
Warmerdam looked upset to have allowed a draw by repetition at the end, but by that point the position finally was equal.
Vincent Keymer survives after correctly claiming a draw by 3-fold repetition against Max Warmerdam and co-leads the tournament after Round 2! #TataSteelChess pic.twitter.com/OdNvr10bIm
— chess24 (@chess24com) January 19, 2025
So Keymer is one of five leaders despite his wildly uneven play. In Monday's round three, he will have Black against defending champion Wei.
Praggnanandhaa vs. Arjun and Gukesh vs. Caruana are the clear blockbuster encounters.
Challengers: 7 Leaders
After five wins in round one in the Challengers, the second round was quieter, with three wins, and none of them from players who had started with a full point.
Tata Steel Challengers: Round 2 Results
That left no less than half the field, seven players, tied for first on 1.5/2.
Tata Steel Challengers: Standings After Round 2
The four draws were relatively quiet (IM Arturs Pijpers and GM Aydin Suleymanli needed just 15 moves), while the wins were all convincing, with GM Benjamin Bok playing the game of the day to defeat 16-year-old prodigy GM Ediz Gurel. Bok, playing Tata Steel for the first time in seven years, said his 1.e4 was a bit of a surprise and described how what followed was assessed by a walking eval bar:
"Right after the opening, Anish [Giri] as always was making strange faces, so I was wondering, did I mess up the opening, or did he? But it was him, so I got a nice position… Once I got c5 in, things are already looking really tough for Black."
Not bad for a player who called himself, "not a professional chess player, but a chess professional!"
One matchup to look out for in round three will be the clash between the only two players still to get on the scoreboard, with 11-year-old Oro having the white pieces against Bulmaga.
How To Watch
The 87th edition of Tata Steel Chess takes place January 18-February 2, 2025, in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. The time control is 100 minutes for 40 moves followed by 50 minutes to finish each game, with a 30-second increment from move one. Both the Masters and Challengers groups are 14-player round-robin tournaments.
Previous coverage:
Colin McGourty led news at Chess24 from its launch until it merged with Chess.com a decade later. An amateur player, he got into chess writing when he set up the website Chess in Translation after previously studying Slavic languages and literature in St. Andrews, Odesa, Oxford, and Krakow.
