Monday, August 23, 2010 at 3:13PM I'm looking into some other options, but for the moment the story is that readers can leave comments, but they won't appear until I moderate them.
Monday, August 23, 2010 at 1:23PM Lots more information available on the league website, including team lineups, pairings, predictions and much else besides.
Monday, August 23, 2010 at 10:24AM (1) In addition to the NH tournament, another event that just finished - also needing a playoff - was the French Championship. Laurent Fressinet and Romain Edouard both finished with 8/11, but Fressinet became the champion when he won their rapid playoff 1.5-.5.
(2) Starting now - or a couple of moments ago, anyway - is the Spanish Team Championship. Shirov, Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov, Vachier-Lagrave and Short are among the big names playing right now, and Nakamura, Gashimov and Caruana are also scheduled to play at some point. Live games here.
(3) At the end of the week, there's the Arctic Securities Chess Stars. It's a four-player rapid (20' + 10") with Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Judit Polgar and Jon Ludvig Hammer. There are two stages: first, a double round-robin to determine the top two, then final matches for 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th. The first round-robin is on Saturday, the second on Sunday, and the final matches on Monday.
Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 12:13PM After eight rounds, Anish Giri led Nakamura by half a point in the battle for supremacy on the Rising Stars team. The pairings the rest of the way strongly favored Giri, who had van Wely and Nielsen to Nakamura's Svidler and Gelfand*. Indeed, it looked bad for Nakamura in round 9: Giri was winning six ways from Sunday (i.e. easily) against van Wely while Nakamura only managed the worse half of a draw against Svidler. But Giri somehow failed to win, so the half-point distance remained.
In round 10, Nakamura fought but "only" drew with Gelfand (Gelfand, by the way, won again in round 9, and finished with an impressive +4 score, winning three times with Black!). Giri lost to Nielsen, however, and so it was on to a blitz playoff to see who would get the Amber invite. As all or almost all of you know, a blitz playoff against Nakamura is not likely to turn out well for the other guy, and that's what happened here.
The first game, with Nakamura as White, was quite chaotic, but he gradually obtained control. At some point he might have been a bit sloppy, and in the final position ...Kc6 would just about equalize. Unfortunately for Giri, he chose instead the "move" ...Resigns. 1-0, Nakamura. Game 2 was an absolutely blowout, and might have been a bit of home cooking by Nakamura. He found a very enterprising piece sac against Giri's Catalan, and absolutely blew him off the board in a tactical sequence.
Giri is young and improving very rapidly, but this year belonged to Nakamura. It will be very interesting to see him in the Amber tournament. I don't know how strong he is (or will be by then) in blindfold, but he'll be a handful and then some for everyone there at rapid time controls!
* Thanks to all the people who wrote in for me to correct the earlier error!
Friday, August 20, 2010 at 1:30PM I'm getting tired of deleting spam comments every day, and won't have much time to blog the next couple of days, so for now I'll deal with these lowlifes (and/or their bots) by simply blocking all comments. Come Monday, I'll work on a better solution. My apologies to legitimate commentators, who can at least still reach me via the contact form on the right sidebar (scroll down a little and you'll find it).
Friday, August 20, 2010 at 1:15PM I only have time for a quick post with the results and little more, so here goes:
The Experience Team had White today, but it didn't help very much. Actually, for the most part, nothing helped either side very much, as it was a day of missed opportunities.
Two players who didn't miss their opportunities were Gelfand and So. Gelfand seems content with his +3, and has apparently decided to draw with anyone will let him. As So had Black and has had a lousy tournament, this would seem to suit him as well, but in fact he tried for a few moves before calling it a day: draw.
Likewise, Giri didn't miss any opportunities either, and massacred Ljubojevic. Ljubo must have been optimistic when he went pawn-grabbing with 17.Na4, but Giri's kingside counterplay cut him to pieces. It was a very good game for the youngster and a(nother) bad game for Ljubo, who has definitely been the tournament rabbit. He can play great chess, and he definitely used to - he was once #3 in the world. But he's not only much older than even his Experience teammates, he also plays very rarely and doesn't work on his theoretical prep very much. An in-form Ljubojevic would be an adornment to the tournament, but out of form (which is what should be expected most of the time, given his basically retired status) he's going to be dinner.
The other three games left at least one player bitterly disappointed. Nakamura, as usual, pressured his opponent (Nielsen in this case) in the hopes of extracting an error, and he succeeded. Unfortunately for Nakamura, he immediately returned the favor with 36...Qe5?(?), allowing 37.Bg6 shutting in the pitiful Rh6. With scrappy play he held the draw, but he would have had some winning chances without that error.
Svidler had a big advantage against Caruana out of the opening, and it would have remained on 21.Bxd5 or 24.Bxd5. Unfortunately, Svidler thought up a brilliant idea, but missed the neat tactical shot 25...Bxc2! until it was too late. (It seems from his time usage that he found it before 25.Rxe7, which was the point of 24.Ba4.) After the smoke had cleared Black was two pawns up, but had no winning chances with his vulnerable king and White's bishop on h6. Draw.
Finally, van Wely had enduring pressure against Howell and was likely winning somewhere, but he never found the knockout blow. Howell escaped in an 88-move game, thanks to the textbook bishop and wrong-colored rook pawn draw. (Or if you prefer, rook pawn and wrong-colored bishop.)
So there are two rounds to go, the Rising Stars team leads by 4 points, and Giri leads the Amber race by half a point over Nakamura and a full point over Caruana.
Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:18PM Have a look, here. The show is free (free registration required) and available on-demand for the next month or so. No one could shake an attack out of his sleeve like the Wizard from Riga, the great Mikhail Tal, so you're bound to enjoy this game!
Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 5:36PM The Experience team had been catching up, but today was another success story for the Rising Stars, who won the round 3.5-1.5.
The first game to finish was the extremely ridiculous Nakamura-van Wely contest. There was a game in the same variation in the World Open last month, and van Wely has apparently annotated it for the forthcoming issue of New in Chess magazine. The game he annotated was Smith-Laznicka, and van Wely explained at one point why 12...Nd7 (as opposed to Laznicka's 12...Ng4) was a lemon. He did a very good job, giving a variation that led to a completely won position for White after 16 moves. And - you guessed it - that's exactly what he did, with Black, against Nakamura. He reached that exact same hopeless position after 16 moves, and resigned one move later. There's too much to memorize!
The win let Nakamura catch up to Giri in the battle for Amber, as Giri only drew with Gelfand. Interestingly, we got to see old Gelfand here: he played a Najdorf! It was a good game, too, with both sides having some chances before it finished in a draw. The other draw of the day was So's. After his poor start, So seems to have lost all his ambitions in the tournament, and he drew quickly with Svidler.
Howell hadn't had a particularly glamorous tournament either, but he tried hard against the third tournament tailender, Ljubojevic. As always, Ljubo used tons of time early in the game, and it probably should have cost him. Near the time control, however, Howell missed a tactic and his opponent escaped with a perpetual.
The fifth game was another win for the youngsters, as Caruana outplayed Nielsen almost from start to finish. Still, he had a hard time striking the finishing blow, but eventually Nielsen buckled and it was all over.
In the overall standings, the Rising Stars lead 19-16, and the standings for the Rising Stars look like this:
1-2. Giri, Nakamura 4.5
3. Caruana 4
4-5. So, Howell 3
Tournament site here, replayable games here. Note: I only annotated Nakamura-van Wely, but the notes are pretty deep, and based on comments I made for a ChessLecture.com video earlier today.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 9:24PM An impressive event starting in a few days is the Spanish Team Chess Championship. Nine 2700s are scheduled to play: Alexei Shirov, Vugar Gashimov, Etienne Bacrot, David Navara, Zoltan Almasi, Baadur Jobava, Ruslan Ponomariov, Hikaru Nakamura and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. (And there are at least three others within three points of 2700 as well!)
More info here.
"Why Do I Always Get Black Against Titled (Stronger) Players?"
This weekend I played in a strong open swiss tournament and was in the running for first, but lost in the last round to GM Ben Finegold. He had White, but that wasn't really a factor: I got a perfectly good position out of the opening, and only mistakes in the ending cost me the game. Still, it would have been nice to have White, and I've heard many players lament that they "always" get Black against titled or significantly higher-rated opponents.
It's likely an exaggeration and a bit of a selection effect (they "forget" when they're White, but each Black game confirms the "always" narrative), but I think there's something to it. To the extent that there is some truth to it, the lamenter should probably stop complaining. Here's why. Aside from the luck of something like a first-round pairing against a strong player, you'll have to do some winning to play them. Now, the question is this: other than in cases where you're overwhelmingly stronger than your opponents, are you likelier to win your games when you're White, or when you're Black? With White, naturally. Let's say you're likely to face a big gun in round 4 of a tournament, when you're 3-0. If you've had two Blacks, you're less likely to have gone 3-0, even if you were a favorite in all your games. It's a lot easier to have done it with two Whites. But then, guess what? You're due for Black against the big gun!
This probably holds for the round 3 situation as well. Let's assume you're in the top half of the draw, but not a top player yourself. In round 1 you're probably going to beat whoever you're playing, and in round 2 you'll get a more challenging opponent, but one you're a moderate favorite against. If you had Black in round 1, then you're more likely to win in round 2, but to suffer in round 3 with Black against a very good player. If you've got Black in round 2, then you might win and succeed, but your chances of getting nicked go up as well.
If all this is correct, then the reason the lamenter should cease his song of woe is simple: if he weren't due for Black in their game with the better player, he would have been less likely to face the better player in the first place. (And note the irony: his previous opponent may have been a victim of the same sort.)
Hopefully someone will (or maybe already has) worked out the math of the situation, but this seems like a plausible account of why non-top seeds will more often wind up with Black in the big games with the favorites in open swisses in the mid-to-late rounds.
[Note: Comments are again possible, but I will moderate them before they appear. Other solutions are being considered, so stay tuned.]