The Chess Mind

As promised, or at least threatened, here are a couple of games from Sunday's rounds at the Amber Rapid & Blindfold tournament in Nice, France. Both are blindfold games, but that's where the similarities end. The first game, Carlsen-Mamedyarov, was a very interesting game that holds up on its own merits, without any qualifiers about its being a blindfold contest. The second game, however, shows a peculiarly blindfold error, one that has occurred more than once in this event. van Wely's problem in his game with Leko was not that he forgot Leko's move, but apparently that he misread it in the first place! As I note in my commentary, he might have been able to realize his error, but that chance vanished in what may have been a moment of overconfident euphoria. Next time, he might take a page out of Anand's book (see the round 6 video covering his blindfold game with Karjakin).