This is Not an April Fool’s Day Joke! || Sindarov vs Caruana || FIDE Candidates Tournament 2026 R4

Hello everyone and welcome to the first game we're covering from round four of this year's FIDE Candidates Tournament. It is Djavokir Sindarov versus Fabiana Korwana. Djavokir, this is his first time ever in the Candidates Tournament. He's only 20 years old and he qualified by winning the FIDE World Cup. Some of you might say, okay, that's winning one event, it's silly to qualify via that, but if you've seen who he faced and what he had to overcome to win it, you would not be saying that. And even after that, he's been playing impeccable chess and he's been playing Candidates level chess pretty much for the entire time. But his opponent, a most vile one, it is Fabiana Korwana. He qualified, this is his fifth time actually that he qualifies for the FIDE Candidates Tournament. He even won it once. If you guys recall, he challenged Magnus Carlsen in 2018 for the title of World Champion. He lost the match, but he did the Drew Magnus over the course of 12 classical games. So, incredible matchup, youth versus experience. Both of them love crazy positions. Both of them love to calculate. I mean, it's an incredible matchup. And a lot of you were saying in the previous video that they're probably just going to draw really quickly because no one wants to lose before, you know, a rest day when you're doing so well in the Candidates as going into this round. They are leading with 2.5 out of 3. So, let's see if that is a correct assessment. And as usual, let's just enjoy a nice photo. There we have it. Djawokir on the left, Fabi on the right, few moves in. Again, nothing odd right out of the start. Djawokir's suit seems to be very nice. Seems like a very fine material. I don't know. That's one thing I can get out of it. But okay, let's check out the game. So, Djawokir with white opens with pawn to d4. We have pawn to d5, c4, e6, knight to f3, and we have d captures on c4. So, the Queen's Gambit accepted the Rosenthal variation. Not accepting it on move 2, accepting it on move 3. And it has some differences, but you can transpose into a lot of stuff, but they stick to the main line. e3, we have knight to f6, bishop captures on c4, and pawn to c5. So, back to the usual stuff. We have castles kingside. And now a6 and queen to c7 are nowadays considered to be the top-end moves, even bishop to e7. Here, Fabi goes knight to c6. Again, a lot of theory and even games in the database, so nothing new being played here. Queen to e2. And again, you could capture here. Well, that's one way to do it, and then just go bishop to e7. It seems like you can capture on d4 like this, but allowing white to just grab hold of development like this may be a bit too risky, you know, for a candidates tournament. So, instead, we have pawn to a6, we have knight to c3, pawn to b5, challenging the bishop. And now, bishop to b3 is what is almost exclusively played here, as did Nakamura play against Elenir Dominguez-Perez in the 2021 St. Louis Rapid Tournament, where he defeated him. But here we have bishop to d3, and it's not a new position just yet, but this is now very rare, especially for top grandmaster games. Bishop to b7, we have pawn to a4, and now, again, some moves have been played here, like c4 and b captures on a4, but Fabi knows what's the best move in any position, and he plays pawn to b4, and it is now, as of move 10, that we have a completely new game. And this is where I really, really want you to pay attention to the clocks. Look at this. Djawokid, an hour and 54 minutes, whereas Fabi's already down to an hour and 35 minutes. And now look at this, knight to e4. Played instantly, so not even waiting a second. Okay, it's the first move that comes to mind, so nothing odd about that. And the point is that if you trade here, let's say captures, captures you go, let's say queen b6, and now pawn to b3, you can go knight a5, challenge this pawn, and now white would have to go back. Or maybe you can try to play something risky, like d captures on c5, but you could also just defend the pawn, and that is perfectly fine. And black doesn't seem to get all that much here. Even if you capture, white can even play bishop to b2. And the black king is still in the center of the board. So Fabi gets a different idea. He first plays knight to a5, and now he says, all right, now I'm going to do my thing, and I already have a knight on a5. But now Djawokid can throw in a knight captures on f6, where capturing with the queen, you allow pawn to e4, and it just looks wrong. So Fabi goes g captures, now he has a bishop on b7, he's preparing rook to g8, and it seems like maybe, you know, as Yasser Serevan often says, you give your opponent your home address a bit too quickly. And now after d captures on c5, we have knight to b3. And this is where the game really blows up, because the problem here for Fabiano is that Djawokid is still in prep, and he plays pawn to c6. So this is still all preparation. Look at him, he hasn't even spent seven minutes reaching this position against, you know, a five-time contender of the candidates, and a player who has already won the candidates tournament. So this is just incredible. And the idea that if you capture on a1, you could maybe survive, is, you know, just non-existent. Because after captures, and let's say rook to b8, how do you get the knight out? For example, bishop captures on a6, and now you go knight b3, bishop to b5 check. You have to go king e7, and now queen c4, you attack the knight, and okay, you can maybe save the knight this way, but look at your king. You're going to play queen captures on b4, and no more squares for the black king. You will have to block, and then it's just a free knight. And okay, black can resign here. So after c6, Fabi had the capture with the bishop, now comes knight to d4. Again, look at the time, not wasting any time. This is still preparation. Or maybe it's not. Maybe Djokovic is just playing like this from an unknown position against Fabi. I'm not completely excluding that, but okay. Again, if you go after the rook here, we can explore it, but I mean, you just capture, you attack the queen, and after the queen moves, you go back knight b4, and also you cover b3, so the knight can't really move. And while you can play b3 here with black, you're still just gonna... it's just not all that impressive. You're not getting anything for having your king on e8. I mean, it's pretty silly. So after knight d4, okay, Fabi plays knight captures on d4, e-captures, and finally rook to g8. Fabi actually playing all of the top engine moves here. So he is burning time, but he is refuting what Djokovic is throwing at him. So g2 hanging, we have pawn to g3, and now how do you approach this position? There are so many moves that come to mind. For example, queen d5. Why not? I mean, it's a great move. We could see what happens. Well, then the idea is f3, and now you can even capture this with check, but then you allow bishop to e3, and now where do you go? Queen to e5. No other move really makes sense, because queen d5, you also have bishop to e4. So let's say you go queen e5, rook a to c1, and you maybe give white a bit too much development. It's probably still possible to survive, but not easily. On the other hand, you could ignore this and just go after the pawn right away. This is, in fact, the top move recommended by the engine. And then the difference is, after bishop d3, now you have the option of going queen to d5 after this retreat, and now if white insists on f3, which he should, otherwise he's just going to lose the game, then you play f5, and there's no bishop to e4, and this is the best possible structure black can hope for. And probably it's the one that Fabi had in his mind when he played pawn to f5 first, so he didn't go for queen d5 or queen captures. He went with this move order, but now Djabokov no longer has to play f3. There's no threat of checkmate, and he just goes bishop to c4, and now Fabi has to make a really difficult decision. This pawn is still hanging, but if you capture, then comes bishop captures on e6. And, I mean, look at this. This is move 18 of a candidate's tournament against where one of the players is Fabiano Caruana, and he's not playing white. I mean, this is probably what Fabi should have played, but, yeah, here you just have to play queen e4, and there's no way... this is the only way to do it. And after captures and captures, okay, you bring the bishop back, and now black can hope to maybe survive this game. It's equal material. Both players have the bishop there. Black's pawn structure is a little bit ruined, so white will be the one pushing here, but this is the best Fabi had. Here he played rook to g4 instead. Now also puts pressure on this d4 pawn via the rook, but now comes bishop to e3, and the pawn is now defended. We have bishop to d5, rook a to c1, and now bishop to e7. And it seems like the worst is behind Fabi, but look at the clock. Six minutes, where Djavokid has more than an hour on the clock. And there are... any move you make here, you make a move, your uncle makes a move, anyone makes a move, your cat makes a move, it's a good move for white. You could go rook f to d1, sorry, to d1, you could go bishop to f4, b3, all very nice moves. Djavokid even captures a pawn here, and the problem is Fabi is down too much on time. And he doesn't have time to calculate bishop to b5, queen to b5 on every move, so he just moves his king. It's in fact the best move he can. Probably if he had more time, he would ignore it and start pushing that h-pawn. But okay, king f8, so he doesn't have to calculate all of the checks. Bishop to h6 could be a nice idea, but after king g8, there is no follow-up. So maybe keep it as a threat, you know, don't execute it just yet. We have bishop to b5, okay, nicely moving the bishop, the pawn on a4 is defended, bishop to f6, and now rook f to d1, king to g7, and now bishop to c6. Now, offering a trade, rook to a5, and now bishop captures on d5. Rook captures on d5 with a quadruple threat on that d4 pawn, and now comes rook to c5. And the question is, what do you play here? Djawokir already has a passed pawn. If you capture on c5, that's going to be another passed pawn. And what about just capturing on d4? Is that a thing, if you play bishop captures on d4? Not really, because there's a nice vicious move here. Rook captures on d5, and after queen captures, you have a bit of a problem here. There's not much for black to do, and white can just start pushing a5. And you don't have a move here. Pretty much anything you play, a6 is coming, even a7 is coming, and there's no stopping that pawn. So after rook to c5, Fabi plays rook back to d7, but now Djawokir goes forward, pawn to d5. And again, what do you play here? Fabi played e-captures on d5, but other moves really aren't that much better. I mean, if you play anything else, he's just going to play b3, and then, you know, just start pushing that a pawn. So Fabi played captures on d5, but now, of course, it's defended twice. Here we have queen to f3. And this is now a dead loss for Fabi. Djawokir is still with 45 minutes on the clock, Fabi down below 5 minutes, and it's only move 28. He still needs to make 12 more moves to reach time control. So Djawokir just completely destroyed him here. But it's still not over. It's Fabiano we're talking about. Bishop captures on b2, rook c-captures on d5, we have rook captures, rook captures, attacks Fabi's queen, queen to e8, and now comes rook captures on f5, attacking the rook on g4, rook to g6, and now even pawn to h4. So now Fabi is down a pawn, his position is terrible, and, well, at this point, he is now hoping for a miracle. We have bishop to c3, now comes pawn to h5, attacks the rook here, we have rook to a6, and now queen to g4 with check. King to h8, we have bishop to d4 with check, f6, and here a beautiful, beautiful finish by Sindarov, rook to c5. And the problem is, you can't really do anything. If you capture the bishop, rook c8 wins the queen, that's all there is to it. And if you try something like rook c6, while you can play that, then comes rook captures, and after queen captures, look at this, h6, threatening checkmate. If you defend that one, then comes this one, threatening checkmate. The king cannot go into the game. And if you stop that one, then again we threaten this one, and that's it. No more stopping checkmate, you will have to block, and then comes captures, queen g7, and queen captures with checkmate. So, incredible, incredible stuff here. I mean, there's a reason why I didn't have a pause the video moment in this video, and that is because Fabi made zero mistakes here. Even if you put that into an engine and analyze it, the engine will give you that Fabi committed six inaccuracies, so that's it. Zero mistakes, zero blunders, only six inaccuracies, but Djawokir took advantage of each one, and, you know, advantage kept piling up, piling up, and in the end, six inaccuracies were enough to take down Fabiano Caruana. So, Djawokir now is world number six on the live ratings. He's three and a half out of four in the candidates tournament, which is absolutely unheard of. I heard someone mention that Topalov did it in his run in the candidates for the title, but yeah, three and a half out of four, I mean, just wow. That is just incredible. This is like, this is not a game you expect to see from Fabiano Caruana in the defeated candidates tournament, but it's not about him. It's just that Djawokir plays that kind of chess, and he can do this to anyone, and he's doing it to everyone, and he keeps doing it every game, every game, and for those of you who have been saying that, okay, he doesn't belong here, I mean, yes, he won the World Cup, but it's a silly way to qualify. He keeps proving everyone wrong, every game that he plays, and now, even in the candidates, he's three and a half out of four. That's not normal. I mean, that is seriously not normal. So yeah, definitely hoping to see more of this, and, you know, who knows where it'll end up, but for now, he has the absolute best chance of qualifying for a title match against world champion Gukesh, but we'll see. Very early on in the tournament, anything could still happen. You know, it's not easy to keep up playing at this level, but he's young. He's only 20 years old. If anyone can do it, it's definitely him. So yeah, really hope you enjoyed it. I will cover the other games as well, so stay tuned for that, and yeah, here I even have the World Top 10, but okay, it's the World Top 12. Some of the games are still happening, so ignore those that are currently live, but yeah, Sindarov, world number six on the live ratings, 2759. Incredible stuff. Fabi with this loss drops off from that 2800, so he was there for one day, but yeah, it's not easy to remain in the 2800 region. So yeah, really hope you enjoyed it. I would like to thank Derek King, Andreas Rosenthal, Oskar Nissen, Manuel Silva, and David Nelson for your contribution to my channel. Thank you a lot. I really appreciate it. As usual, you can check two of my previous videos here. Thank you for watching, and I will see you soon, continuing to check up on your wonderful suggestions and whatever else happens in the chess world. Thank you all. I will see you soon, and have an excellent rest of your day.