If you wish to unsettle your opponents, first attack them and second, play the moves quickly. It’s far from easy to pull it off, but nobody does it better than Ian Nepomniachtchi. Among the world’s best, ‘Nepo’ stands out for his aggressive play, made all the more dangerous by marshalling an element of bluff. Are those moves coming so fast because he is still playing from memory, following his sharp opening repertoire? Has he already seen that the attack is overwhelming, and barely merits a second thought? One cannot know for sure, but Nepo is such a strong player (fourth in the world, at the last count) that one has to take him seriously. Nor does staring down a bluff promise an easy victory. His immense tactical flair gives him an uncanny knack for rescuing bad positions.
At the Magnus Carlsen Invitational tournament, held online in March, Nepomniachtchi won a wild semi-final match against Carlsen. His opponent in the final, Anish Giri, described Nepomniachtchi as ‘faster, more dangerous and sharper than Magnus… If you look only at his pluses you think he’s the best player in the world’. Giri, the more consistent and classical player, predicted a wild match, knowing all too well that Nepomniachtchi often pushes the envelope too far.
At one point, Giri needed only a draw with White to close out the match, and put up a sturdy blockade. Undeterred, Nepomniachtchi played a skilful manoeuvring game (at great speed) which levelled the scores and landed the players in a blitz playoff. This can’t have been a happy prospect for Giri, who in January lost an important blitz playoff at Wijk aan Zee against Jorden van Foreest.
The first game (shown below) saw Giri with the White pieces and what began as a Sicilian soon transposed into an Advance French.
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