Niepómniashi and Caruana stand out after the first lap

One, Ian Niepómniashi, won with very little effort despite the fact that he did it with the black pieces against the Hungarian Richard Rapport, thanks to a very deep laboratory recipe.

The other, Fabiano Caruana, after a tedious and hard work of almost six hours with white against the tough Azerbaijani Teimur Radyábov.

Both, the Russian (with half a point more) and the American, remain undefeated in the middle of the Candidates Tournament that takes place in Madrid's Palacio de Santoña, where the 8th round of the 14 scheduled will be played this Sunday, broadcast live by elpais.com

“To win a Candidates Tournament you need an inordinate passion for what you do, a tremendous amount of training in the previous months and a very solid motivation”, explained on Friday (rest day) the Latvian Dana Reizniece-Ozola, general manager and deputy president of the International Federation (FIDE), during the closing of the Intercontinental Mini-Candidates tournament for children, organized by ChessKids (Chess.com) with 52 participating countries, whose final phase was played at the same venue.

The Kazakh Artiom Bogdánov won, followed by the Spaniards Álex Villa and Jaime Rey.

Of those three virtues mentioned by the

of FIDE, who is also a grandmaster, the first two can be taken for granted in the eight participants.

But the 3rd is something else.

For example, it is debatable that the degree of motivation of the Chinese Liren Ding is the maximum, despite the fact that he is the 2nd in the world, given the mistreatment that his own Government dedicates to him, sending him alone to Madrid and with less than three days in advance about the opening round, even though the time difference is six hours.

And that of the American Hikaru Nakamura, more concerned about his nightly internet broadcasts, which have made him a millionaire.

Fabiano Caruana, at the start of the 7th round this Saturday at the Palacio de SantoñaL.G.

Rapport is supposed to have been motivated: he is young, 26 years old, very creative, and on the rise.

But his low self-esteem borders on the pathological, and also leads him to incomprehensible answers, like the one this Saturday after losing to Niepómniashi, when they asked him when he stopped playing by heart: "That's what I'd like to know."

The facts are that the Magyar - who is preparing his change of nationality to Romanian - rejected, with white, the draw by repetition of moves in the 18th to get into a garden full of snakes.

At first sight, his position was not bad, but the fact that the Slav had moved very fast up to that moment indicated that he had deeply studied it at home, as was later verified.

Radyabov is one of the toughest members of the elite, much less creative but tougher than Rapport.

And he forced Caruana to work very hard for almost six hours to get another victory, which allows him to stay very close to Niepómniashi.

All the others are almost ruled out, except for Nakamura to beat Caruana this Sunday.

But if Reizniece-Ozola is right, Caruana shouldn't lose that fight.

Classification (after the 7th round

): 1st Niepómniashi 5.5 points;

2nd Caruana 5;

3rd Nakamura 3.5;

4th-6th Rapport, Ding and Duda 3;

7th-8th Radyabov and Firouzja 2.5.

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