Maghsoodloo Ends Praggnanandhaa's 47-Game Unbeaten Streak

GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu hadn't lost for 47 classical games straight, but today that impressive streak came to an end. He lost to GM Parham Maghsoodloo, who is the proud leader of the Prague Masters with a 100 percent score.

GM Gukesh Dommaraju won the longest game of the round against GM Thai Dai Van Nguyen, the only player to start with two losses. Gukesh shares second place with GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who drew with GM Vidit Gujrathi. The games GM David Navara vs. GM Vincent Keymer and GM Richard Rapport vs. GM Mateusz Bartel also ended in draws.

Day three starts on Thursday at 9 a.m. ET / 15:00 CET / 7:30 p.m. IST.

Prague Masters | Round 2 Results

With the Masters, Challengers, and Futures tournaments already underway, the Prague Chess Festival grew even bigger on Wednesday. A big open tournament took off with players from 41 federations, including 16 GMs. The top seed is GM Eltaj Safarli, while other notable participants are the streamers WGM Dina Belenkaya, WFM Alexandra Botez and Andrea Botez.

Meanwhile, earlier in the day the youngest players of the festival had an unforgettable experience as they got the chance to attend a lecture by none other than GM Viswanathan Anand, ambassador of the tournament.

💡Ambassador of the Futures tournament gave a private workshop to our youngest players today. Thank you for your lesson @vishy64theking ! ♟️
📷Petr Vrabec#PICF #PICF2024 #PragueChess #vishyanand #futures pic.twitter.com/n2QQWxyVVQ

— Prague International Chess Festival (@PragueChess) February 28, 2024

That same Anand will be spending another day as India's number one on the live ratings after Praggnanandhaa's loss today—on the board where the 15th world champion made the ceremonial first move.

In a middlegame where White had placed his pieces in attacking positions, the 18-year-old GM from Chennai was only slightly worse when he blundered a simple tactic that left him to do one thing only, and that was resign.

Afterward, the players analyzed this interesting game for more than an hour after which Maghsoodloo joined the live broadcast. He revealed that after his disappointing result in Wijk aan Zee, he spent 7-10 hours training per day and feels very well now. That's the spirit!

GM Rafael Leitao annotates the game below: 

Maghsoodloo's next opponent is Keymer, a repeat of a game played only a few days ago in the Bundesliga when the Iranian player ended up winning, but that's tomorrow. Today, Keymer looked very solid in his draw with Navara.

The German GM was one of the participants at the Freestyle Chess tournament earlier this month. Today, he said he is enjoying both formats. Still, his excellent preparation does seem to help him very well in classical:

Vidit's choice in the opening was rather timid: a line in the Spanish Four Knights that often leads straight to a draw. Abdusattorov, however, decided not to follow the main theoretical waters but to play a pawn-down endgame instead. The Uzbek GM demonstrated nicely that White doesn't have much there either:

At the end of the day, Gukesh caught Abdusattorov in second place. He seemed quite ready for Nguyen's English opening, which turned into some kind of reversed Benoni where Black was fine out of the opening. After a few inaccurate moves with his queen, the Czech GM soon found himself under strong pressure, and an exchange sacrifice couldn't prevent a second loss.

Prague Masters | Round 2 Standings

The Challengers tournament has been fairly quiet so far with just two decisive games in two days. Sadly for GM-elect Vaishali Rameshbabu, she was on the losing end of both.

Prague Challengers | Round 2 Results

Prague Challengers | Round 2 Standings

The 2024 Prague Chess Festival takes place February 27-March 7 at the Don Giovanni Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic. The format is a single round-robin. The time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 30 more minutes for the rest of the game, with a 30-second increment per move starting on move one.