Firouzja Beats Praggnanandhaa To Catch Leader
GM Alireza Firouzja pounced on a blunder by GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu to win the battle of the players who started day two in second place and catch GM Vladimir Fedoseev in the 2025 Superbet Rapid & Blitz Poland lead. GM Aravindh Chithambaram moved up to third place after finding the move of the day to beat GM Veselin Topalov, while GMs Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave also scored 4/6 to move up the standings.
Day three starts Monday, April 28, at 8 a.m. ET / 14:00 CEST / 5:30 p.m. IST.
- Standings
- Firouzja Catches Leader, Praggnanandhaa Suffers
- Aravindh Brilliancy Takes Him Up To 3rd
- MVL, Aronian Recover From Tough Starts
The main change on day two was Firouzja catching Fedoseev in the lead.
Superbet Rapid & Blitz Poland Standings After Day 2
Firouzja Catches Leader, Praggnanandhaa Suffers
The second day in Warsaw was much quieter than the first, with nine of the 15 games drawn and much of the drama concentrated in the first round of the day. That saw the second-placed duo face off in a tense game that looked sure to end in a draw when Firouzja's middlegame edge fizzled out.
We were one move, 53...Qg1+, away from Praggnanandhaa making a draw by repetition, but then he decided to play on with 53...Rd8. In itself, it wasn't a mistake, but a couple of moves later and 55...Rd4??, a rush of blood to the head, was suddenly losing on the spot.
At the end Praggnanandhaa was dumbfounded at what he'd done and simply let his clock run out, so that the signal the game was over was when Firouzja began to replace the pieces for the next game.
Firouzja beats Praggnanandhaa to catch Fedoseev in the lead — at the end of the game, as Pragg's clock ran out, Alireza just began putting pieces on the board for the next game! https://t.co/0mHvXjLzun#GrandChessTour pic.twitter.com/Qr7nxnGc03
— chess24 (@chess24com) April 27, 2025
That saw Firouzja catch Fedoseev, who drew all three games on day two, with Firouzja also going on to draw against GMs Jan-Krzysztof Duda and Aronian.
For Praggnanandhaa, meanwhile, things would go from bad to worse. He survived being very low on time in a crazy tactical skirmish against Aronian in the second game of the day, before slipping to defeat in what had initially seemed an innocuous position against Topalov. Once again, the game ended when the young Indian star ran out of time, though the move he was trying to make wouldn't have altered what was a dead-lost position.
For the 2nd day in a row, Topalov loses 2 games but then wins the 3rd of the day, this time against Praggnanandhaa, who flagged while trying to play 39...Nxg4: https://t.co/UZBnyCIc0f#GrandChessTour pic.twitter.com/YWN281iYeN
— chess24 (@chess24com) April 27, 2025
It's been a tough sequence of results since Praggnanandhaa started the tournament with two wins and the sole lead.
Aravindh Brilliancy Takes Him Up To 3rd
Praggnanandhaa's fellow countryman, Aravindh, took the chance to climb to third place, as he matched the highest score of the day—4/6 (also posted by Firouzja, Aronian, and Vachier-Lagrave). His star game was a rollercoaster clash with Topalov, who sacrificed a knight on g5, then a rook on e3, and though both sacrifices were dubious, the former world number-one almost made it all work.
At the end, however, Aravindh, who had just 15 seconds on his clock, found the glorious resource 39...Kf4!!, giving up the knight on a5 to rely on the unstoppable kingside pawns. It was played with just three seconds to spare.
That's our Game of the Day, which GM Rafael Leitao analyzes below.
Aravindh drew his remaining games, against Fedoseev and GM David Gavrilescu, and was satisfied overall with how things have gone so far: "My game standard is good, but I feel like I need to work on the opening part. I’m not getting any pleasant positions out of the opening!"
MVL, Aronian Recover From Tough Starts
Tour veteran Vachier-Lagrave, who qualified this year by finishing third in 2024, started the 2025 Tour in Poland in bottom place after day one, losing a winning position to Praggnanandhaa and then crumbling against Topalov in a game he described as "absolutely horrendous."
How did he turn things around? "Today I thought it’s a new day. I should play better!" He did, mixing solid draws against Fedoseev and Duda with a rare case of his playing the white and not the black side of the Najdorf. The Frenchman eased to what he called a "convincing win" over Gavrilescu, which was notable for how completely Black's army was restrained with back-rank checkmate on the cards.
What does arguably the world's leading Najdorf player give as the recipe for beating that opening? Vachier-Lagrave commented:
The secret is to have a small idea somewhere that your opponent doesn’t know about because in the Najdorf when Black knows the book, knows their lines, you don’t have a real chance, but as soon as it gets on a bit of a strange path, the road to equality is often very narrow compared to lines like the Ruy Lopez.
The secret is to have a small idea somewhere that your opponent doesn't know about.
—Maxime Vachier-Lagrave on how to beat the Najdorf
Aronian also failed to win a game on day one, but found his mojo after dinner with Vachier-Lagrave.
I had a nice walk, a nice dinner with Maxime and his friend, and I told myself there must be a reason why I’m here, and the reason should be me playing chess, so I got the motivation!
Motivation alone isn't always enough, and some help was needed in the wild first game of the day. Aronian burned 22 minutes on moves nine and 10 against time-trouble addict GM Bogdan-Daniel Deac. In the end, however, it was Deac's time handling that proved the bigger problem, as he lost his way in a good position and slipped into a mating net.
Aronian is now up to the tie for fourth place, though just two points behind the leaders since no one is setting the world on fire in Warsaw. When Vachier-Lagrave was asked if he ever roots for rivals to lose, he mentioned that sometimes at the end of events, "but it's never personal!" Aronian, meanwhile, made a statement that perhaps requires a lie detector!
I never rooted for anyone to lose a chess game! I think I believe that you shouldn’t be wishing bad for anybody, and I follow that principle in my life. I’m never envious of anybody, and it’s a real blessing, it’s real luck to be like that!
I never rooted for anyone to lose a chess game!
—Levon Aronian
The rapid section in Warsaw ends on Monday with six points still up for grabs for each player as they jockey for position before 18 rounds of blitz on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The live broadcast was hosted by GM Yasser Seirawan, IM Nazi Paikidze, GM Peter Svidler, GM Maurice Ashley, and WGM Anastasiya Karlovich.
The 2025 Superbet Rapid & Blitz Poland is the first event on the 2025 Grand Chess Tour and runs April 26-30 in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. The 10 players first compete in a single rapid round-robin with a time control of 25 minutes plus a 10-second increment per move, followed by a blitz double round-robin with a 5+2 time control.
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.
