Lei, Tan and Goryachkina lead the Women’s Candidates with 5/8

Tan Zhongyi was joined by Lei Tingjie and Aleksandra Goryachkina on 5pts
after 8 Rounds of the Women’s Candidates tournament in Toronto.
It was all so unnecessary too, Tan turned down a draw by repetition
by playing the risky and objectively not very good 21.f4 and
her position more or less went downhill from there.

There’s been very little for Humpy Koneru or
Rameshbabu Vaishali to smile about in this event
and the latter had her 3rd loss in a row, she
was worse and then lost the exchange and that was
pretty much that by move 17.

Kateryna Lagno against Aleksandra Goryachkina
was a fairly well played Ruy Lopez Berlin
which was agreed drawn by repetition on move
34. A small fly in the ointment of this tale
is that instead of repeating with Qd2 Lagno
could have played Bc1 which the engines say
gave her a pretty large advantage.

Nurgyul Salimova was white against Anna Muzychuk and this was a marathon
120 move draw, although almost the last 50 of those
was an attempt to win Rook vs Knight. Salimova had opportunities to
win this game. The first key moment was where Salimova got her chances,
30.Nc7 left black having to find the only move
30…Ba4 for equality, instead the second best 30…Bxb4 was
played and white was winning. The second key moment
was white had to find 34.Ra1 for the largest advantage
or 34.Bd3 to keep her big edge. Instead 34.f3 meant black
was over the worst. White then pressed in a Rook and 3 pawns
vs Knight and 4 pawns endgame. You have to be very careful
in allowing transpositions to King and Pawn endgames, sometimes
the result is not what you expect. Here for one move only white
was winning with 54.Rxe5 and then an 8 move sequence leading to zugzwang
had to be calculated (and other side variations). But given the winning chances were obviously
not high continuing the way it was, maybe it was worth Salimova giving it a punt anyway,
even if all the details couldn’t be precisely seen it might have been possible to tell this was a potential opportunity.

Round 8 Standings:
1st= Lei Tingjie, Goryachkina, Tan Zhongyi 5pts;
4th Lagno 4.5pts;
5th= Salimova, Koneru 3.5.pts;
7th Muzychuk 3pts;
8th Vaishali 2.5pts.

Round 9 14th April at 19:30BST:
Koneru-Lagno,
Vaishali-Tan,
Lei-Salimova,
Muzychuk-Goryachkina.