Gather Around the Fire! || Vincent vs Anish || Sinquefield Cup 2026 R5

Hello everyone and welcome to the other game I promised to cover from round five of this year's Sinquefield Cup. It is Vincent Keymer versus Anish Giri and from this one we actually do have a photo. Let me just find it for you guys.

There we have it. Nothing out of the ordinary nowadays. Pretty much every chess photo is the same. You have two players in a suit unless you know one of them is Levon Aronian then it's a bit more more colorful and a camera in between them.

But still you know helps us get in the mood for the game. The official photographer of course Lennart Ootes. So let's enjoy that for a second and then let's check out the game.

As usual if you find anything out of the ordinary in the photos do mention it in the comment section below. But yeah, Vincent Keymer versus Anish Giri.

It's quite the game. Let's dive straight into it. So we have knight to f3, knight to f6 and pawn to g3. The King's Indian Attack. We have pawn to d5 and now bishop to g2. We have pawn to e6, castles kingside, bishop to e7 and now d3 is a bit more popular here. We have b3 by Vincent, castles kingside and now

bishop to b2. So this transposes us into b3 bishop to b2 the Nimzo-Larsen and there's a lot of theory regarding this but it's at least my level this is where you actually play chess. It's not like you learn a line of Najdorf and then you blunder it on move 20. This is just development. White even slows up

development. White fianchettoes both of the bishops and this is chess. This is really playing chess. So yeah, you really have to be strong to play like this.

Pawn to c5 and we have pawn to e3. c4 more common. Okay, pawn to e3. Knight c6 we have queen d2 and bishop pawn to b6.

We have pawn to c4 and bishop to b7. And again uh this has been played before. Rook to D1 is the standard idea here, but we have knight to A3. This is now uh extremely rare. Uh and uh there are a couple of games where rook to C8 was played. Here we have queen to D7, and it is now as of move 10 that we have a

completely new game. So, Vincent did spend uh a couple of minutes on this knight A3 move. So, I don't know if uh it's still part of the preparation or maybe he went to the bathroom or something, but Anish did burn some time on queen to D7. So, I would say Anish is uh out of theory. And here we have pawn

to D3. Again, some 6 minutes on this uh idea. Rook A to D8 and rook F to D1 followed by queen to C8, just getting off of that D file. And we have rook A to C1, where uh Anish could consider a move like pawn to D4. It makes a lot of sense because if you play E4, then this bishop will be useless for a very, very

long time. And if you capture, still pawn captures uh seems like a very, very nice uh position for black. But okay, uh Anish says, "Uh all right, let's get the queen off of the C file as well." We have C captures, knight captures on D5, and now knight to C4. We have pawn to B5, chasing away the knight. Knight C to