The Daily Update: Biel Comes Alive! Plus Adams, Morozevich Roll On - and More

1. I doubt any of the competitors at Biel read my blog, but it's likely that the sorts of sentiments expressed here about their consistent non-play have been expressed by many others. Perhaps this weighed on their consciences or provoked the organizers to harangue them. Whatever the story, something happened and they FINALLY played some real chess today. It was excellent! All the games were hard-fought, four of the five games finished in a win, and the only draw was a real battle and the last game to finish.

Vachier-Lagrave - Rodshtein 1-0

Andreikin - Caruana 1/2-1/2

Giri - So 1-0

Tomashevsky - Nguyen 0-1

Howell - Negi 1-0

Vachier-Lagrave - Rodshtein was a Gruenfeld that generally saw things going White's way, but the game was decided after 35...Rxe6?? (35...Rg8! 36.Qxh7+ Kf8 favors White, but Black is very much alive). White could have won more easily than he did, but Black was never able to completely extricate himself.

Andreikin - Caruana was a quasi-Rossolimo turned Open Sicilian turned quasi-French, but through all the twists and turns the position remained fairly even. Caruana gradually obtained a slight initiative, but in the end it was only enough to force a draw by repetition.

Giri - So was decided in a queen ending. So's clever 19...Bxh3!? led to that ending, where White was slightly better but a draw looked the likeliest result. The game was decided when So chose 34...f4?! 35.Qh4 Qxh4?, voluntarily transposing into a lost king and pawn ending. No doubt So missed White's triangulation maneuver on moves 42 and 43, but it was a bad risk to enter the pawn ending in the first place. Live and learn.

Tomashevsky - Nguyen was bad for White almost from start to finish. The ending - from move 35 on, say - was quite interesting, in that White desperately wanted to eliminate Black's d4-pawn while Nguyen kept finding ways to keep the pawn alive and meaningful. Black succeeded, and in the end White's preoccupation with the pawn left him unable to cope with threats to his king.

Howell - Negi saw the "Botvinnik System" of the 2.c3 Sicilian. Black was doing fine, but his plan of doubling rooks on the d-file followed by 26...Rd3 ingeniously forced White to beat him. White had no choice but to sac the exchange, and the result was a position where Black had no meaningful active possibilities whatsoever while White could try this and that. Soon White's position was not only easier to play but simply winning, and Black forced him into it!

With eight rounds down and one to go, the standings look like this:

1-2. Vachier-Lagrave, Caruana 5

3-4. Nguyen, Andreikin 4.5

5-8. Giri, So, Tomashevsky, Rodshtein 4

9. Howell 3

10. Negi 2

The last-round pairings:

Rodshtein - Tomashevsky

Negi - Vachier-Lagrave

Caruana - Howell

So - Andreikin

Nguyen - Giri

It's not likely, as the leaders are playing tailenders, but it's possible to have half the field tie for first.

2. The British Championship: It had its first GM vs. GM pairing, with Adams taking on Summerscale. Of course, not all GMs are equally strong, and Adams outrated his opponent by more than 200 points and won quickly. Quite a few of his main rivals drew their games, so although it's still very early the tournament is shaping up nicely for him.

3. The 4th AD San Juan International in Pamplona is up to round 4 today, but only the games and results through round three are available as of this writing. Morozevich leads with 2.5/3.

4. Finally, the Houdini 1.03a - Stockfish 1.8 match continues, and after 22 games Houdini leads 12.5-9.5. Stockfish won game 1, Houdini games 2, 11, 12 and 17. The games have been more accessible, I think, to human eyes, thanks to the opening selection this time around, but the percentage of draws has been very high. Is the moral that the more theoretical the opening, the more objectively drawish the position? I'm not sure. After all, the Rybka 4 - Houdini match wasn't terribly theoretical in its opening selection, but the drawing percentage was high there as well. Maybe Houdini's "style" leads to a greater than average number of draws? Those with access to more data might have something more intelligent to say about this matter.

The British Championship, A Website Alert, And A Surprised Pat on the Back

Round 1 of the British Championship is complete, and while neither Michael Adams nor the highest rated GMs in the next tier down were upset, one GM lost. That was Keith Arkell, to IM Jack Rudd, rated almost 230 points below him.

About Adams, he has an official website you might wish to browse. It has chess content, and who knows - you might get a discount on a Florida condo rental for your next vacation. To my surprise (HT: Srinivas Patri) it also links to what I hope is one of your favorite websites...guess which? I'm guessing I have Mark Crowther or the Streatham & Brixton bloggers to thank for this, but if it Adams himself has browsed the site and made the decision, it's a very pleasant surprise. Whoever did it, thank you!

Another Clever Diaz Cartoon

But the caricature of Ponomariov is rather unflattering.

Biel, Round 7

³ He will judge between many peoples
       and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.
       They will beat their swords into plowshares
       and their spears into pruning hooks.
       Nation will not take up sword against nation,
       nor will they train for war anymore.

 ⁴ Every man will sit under his own vine
       and under his own fig tree,
       and no one will make them afraid,
       for the LORD Almighty has spoken.

(Micah 4:3-4, New International Version)

⁶ The wolf will live with the lamb,
       the leopard will lie down with the goat,
       the calf and the lion and the yearling ^[a] together;
       and a little child will lead them.

 ⁷ The cow will feed with the bear,
       their young will lie down together,
       and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

 ⁸ The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
       and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.

 ⁹ They will neither harm nor destroy
       on all my holy mountain,
       for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
       as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9, New International Version)

Caruana - Giri 1/2-1/2, 32

Vachier-Lagrave - Tomashevsky 1/2-1/2, 38

So - Nguyen 1/2-1/2, 26

Rodshtein - Howell 1/2-1/2, 52 (ok, not a trivial move count, but the game could have concluded 20-30 moves earlier)

Negi - Andreikin 1/2-1/2, 28

Totals through round 7: 26 draws, 9 wins. Compare this with Dortmund, where there were 16 draws and 14 wins, even with the alleged King of the Draws (Leko) and the sometimes draw-amenable Kramnik. Maybe it's a sort of contagion? I bet a statistically savyy person could find something interesting here, to see if once you have a couple of players or a couple of rounds with short, fightless draws, it gathers its own momentum and ruins the whole tournament.

Anand: I Want to be Number One Again

It's a bit funny to see the World Champion expressing such a wish, but it's good, too. Actually, there's a little ambiguity here. Is this a new wish, or is this a non-news item merely consisting of an Indian media outlet quoting Anand expressing something he has felt since the moment he lost the #1 spot on the rating list?

About the content of the piece, we see him say that he realizes he must play more - a plus for chess fans, whether he succeeds in regaining the top spot or not. Unfortunately, while he's going to pay in Norway next month (classical chess or rapid?), he'll then be out of commission until December. That's a problem with being World Champion, I guess: if any of us want to play in a tournament, we can (life permitting) hop in a car, drive around 200 miles (at worst!) and play as soon as next weekend. For Anand, there's having an event with suitable opposition, getting the appearance fee worked out, etc., so even if he wanted to play constantly, like Ivanchuk, it wouldn't be so easy to work out, at least not if he wants to restrict his opposition to the good ol' boy network.

Anyway, I hope he succeeds in his ambitions to play a lot - it would be great for the game.

HT: Brian Karen

Zdenko Krnic, 1947-2010

Not a household name for most of us, but Mr. Krnic was the Editor-in-Chief of Chess Informant. More information about his passing here.

The Daily Update: Ponomariov Wins Dortmund; Plus Biel, The British Championship and Pamplona

There's quite a bit of chess news, and since I played in a tournament this weekend (I won) I've got some catching up to do!

1. Dortmund: Ruslan Ponomariov won, holding off his then-closest rivals Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in round 9 and Le Quang Liem in round 10. Mamedyarov played a crazy gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Be7 5.g4!?/?! 0-0 6.g5 Ne4 7.Qc2?!), but Ponomariov defended calmly and was the only player to enjoy any advantage in the game. Le posed more difficult problems in the last round, despite playing Black, but Ponomariov held on to become the deserved winner with 6.5/10. Le Quang Liem took clear second with 5.5 and demonstrated that he can play with even the world's best players.

Another half-point back, at 50%, were Mamedyarov and Vladimir Kramnik. Mamedyarov was the wild man of the event, winning three and losing three. Kramnik had an adventurous tournament as well, closing the tournament with a loss and a win. In a must-win situation in round 9, he trotted out the Pirc against Arkadij Naiditsch and then started sacrificing things. It wasn't such a bad try, really, but Naiditsch defended very well, took all the freebies and won. In round 10, he went back to playing his normal chess, and won pretty easily against Mamedyarov. (It must be said, however, that Mamedyarov's defense of the pawn-down ending was extremely odd. If the rook + knight + four kingside pawns vs. rook + bishop + three kingside pawns ending after move 25 is a win for Kramnik, it's at least not an easy one. But Mamedyarov handled it rather strangely and resigned on move 31.)

Finally, Naiditsch and Peter Leko brought up the rear with 4/10. For Naiditsch, such a result is more or less normal, and his TPR was within 13 points of his rating. For Leko, on the other hand, it was a poor performance, and only his last round win over Naiditsch prevented the tournament from being an unmitigated disaster. He'll be back, I'm sure.

Tomorrow, I might present some games from the last two rounds.

2. Biel: Round 6, on Saturday, was another lame round. Even though all the players are quite young, they're going it round after round like they have no energy. Four of the five games were drawn, and in 20, 20, 24 and 31 moves. Geez. Only Howell - Vachier-Lagrave went the distance, and was won by Black. On Sunday they had an official day off (how could the spectators tell?), and hopefully on Monday they'll offer the fans something a bit more interesting.

Fabiano Caruana leads with four points; Rodshtein, Vachier-Lagrave, Andreikin, So and Tomashevsky are half a point back.

3. British Championships: It would be more interesting if both Michael Adams and Nigel Short were playing, but at least Adams will participate. (Surprisingly, frankly, since he outranks the second seed by 160 points. Maybe he is doing this in part to build his rating back up, so he can reclaim his place with the Linares etc. crowd?) Play begins on Monday.

4. Pamplona (The Fourth AD San Juan International) features a strong field that includes Alexander Morozevich, near-2700 Laurent Fressinet and Anand second Radoslaw Wojtaszek. Round 3 is on Monday.

Nigel Short, Greatest Hits - Volume 2: A Very "Short" Review

In this post I reviewed the first volume of Nigel Short's two-volume DVD series for ChessBase, and the bottom line is that they're both enjoyable and especially instructive for a general audience. They're not exercises in deep analysis, but it's not mere story-telling either. Short offers very good explanations, and to almost every move, so the videos do have instructional value - it's not just entertainment.

In the first volume, almost every opponent was a world champion (though not necessarily at the time of the game being presented). The opposition this time around is slightly weaker, but not by much - and we get an extra game, too, with 15 clips instead of the 14 in volume 1. There's another win over Garry Kasparov here, and a win over erstwhile FIDE champion Alexander Khalifman, and that wraps it up for world champs. There are super-GMs aplenty, however, including Gelfand, Seirawan, Ljubojevic, Timman, Adams, Korchnoi and Gligoric; so the chess remains at a very high level.

As before, Short's presentation style is very clear and engaging, so to reiterate my conclusion from last time: this is not a purchase for those looking for hard-core training material, a la Dvoretsky, but it's otherwise an enjoyable product for those interested in Short, in seeing high-level games explained in an accessible way by a top player, and/or in the history of the game over the past few decades.

More details and ordering info here.

Studying Chess Made Easy

That's the slightly amphibolous title of long-inactive GM Andy Soltis's latest book, which I zipped through in the last 24 hours. As with many of his books, he's long on offering advice, and it's advice the amateur should seriously consider. Here the advice is on how to study, and along the way he offers tips on how to use your computer for both practice and handling database material; who to spar with; what to do about the problem of too much information when studying openings and endgames; handling tactics and planning in a practical context; studying master games and plenty more besides. It's a good book, and while I think players over 2000 can benefit from it too, those below that level will benefit most of all.

José Raúl Capablanca: 3rd World Chess Champion - A Short Review

Isaak and Vladimir Linder, José Raúl Capablanca: 3rd World Chess Champion (Russell Enterprises, 2010). 272 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

José Raúl Capablanca (1888-1942) was one of the all-time greats, obviously, but as his life recedes ever farther into the past, he becomes more a mere name and less a personality of interest to the general chess world. This is a pity not only because of his merits, but because it is our loss. His masterpieces, and there are many, are both beautiful and instructive. Indeed, Capablanca was a major influence on Botvinnik (who in turn helped train Karpov, Kasparov and Kramnik!) and Fischer, so how could we fail to benefit from the study of his games?

There is of course some English-language material on Capablanca that's fairly easy for most of us to find: the section in volume 1 of Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series, along with Fred Reinfeld's 1942 work The Immortal Games of Capablanca and Irving Chernev's Capablanca's Best Chess Endings, published in 1978. Not to be overlooked are Capa's own books, including the primer Chess Fundamentals and his 1920 volume My Chess Career. (There are more books; I'm just listing the usual suspects, to which the access is easiest.) So there's certainly room in the chess marketplace for a new life and games work on the great Cuban.

Enter the Linders, a father-and-son duo of Russian chess historians. What they offer is a book that fills the aforementioned void, and offers something new - at least new to me. There are the games and game fragments (87 of them), the usual accounts that Capablanca played here and then he played there, and neither aspect is new or earth-shattering. What is nice, however, and - importantly - new is that they draw on a lot of information from Russian and Russian-language sources. Capablanca played in four significant tournaments in Russia/the Soviet Union (St. Petersburg 1914 and the Moscow tournaments of 1925, 1935 and 1936), and of course Russian chess players were interested in and wrote about him even when he wasn't playing there. So even readers familiar with the old sources will learn something new and gain a fuller picture of his career. Those of you with no material on Capablanca may want to consider getting the book to fill the gap, but those of us who do have material about him should consider getting it anyway, on account of the Russian perspectives.

I do have some criticisms, as usual. First, the editing and/or copy editing in this book is pretty bad. Here are some examples, which could be easily multiplied:

Page 20: In the second annotation to Capablanca-Marshall, New York m(2) 1909, it should be White, not Black, who has problems developing his bishop. Later on the page, 17.Rae8 is given; it should be 17...Rae8. And likewise, on page 22, in a note to the fifth game of the aforementioned match, we're told "And of course not 33.Kh8??", but it should be 33.Kh1. (Sadly, there are quite a few errors of this sort.) On the same page, a new game from that match begins, also labeled game 5. It's in fact game 6.

A different sort of error: on page 26 (and elsewhere) we have "Nimzovitch" rather than the correct "Nimzowitsch". And here's still another sort of error: On page 146, we learn this about a series of simuls given in Moscow: "He played a total of one hundred forty-six games with the result +106, -25, =16." (Now that's the kind of math only a politician could love.)

That's all minutiae, of course, and I haven't forgotten errare humanum est. But there's far too much of it. My second complaint is more significant: the game annotations are pretty weak. Fortunately, in the Linders' brand-new book on Emanuel Lasker, German GM Karsten Müller handles those duties. Here, however, the annotations are generally pretty light - often too light to be of any real instructional value - and don't (or only barely) take recent commentary into account.

Third, there are some rather goofy comments that just leave me scratching my head. On pages 81, in a note to the fifth game of the Lasker-Capablanca match, we have this note to Black's 7th move, 7...b6 in a Queen's Gambit Declined: "It is interesting that Karpov, too, fianchettoed his queen's bishop in several games of his world championship matches", and there then follows all 20 moves of game 34 of Karpov's 1984 match with Kasparov. Why exactly this is "interesting" and why Karpov is singled out eludes me, as the variation chosen by Karpov in that game (the Tartakower Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined) has been played in tens of thousands of grandmaster games, and by world champions aplenty: 10 times by Tal, 12 times by Petrosian, 53 times by Spassky, 3 times by Fischer, 28 times by Karpov, 16 times by Kasparov, and 9 times by Kramnik, to pick the most prominent cases.

On page 101, in the comments to Capablanca-Tartakower, New York 1924 (the famous rook ending with 35.Kg3), they suggest that Black pursued exchanges in hopes of a draw, but on move 23 they write that Tartakower could have gone for a rook ending, "but as Tartakower himself noted, 'all rook endings are drawn.'" This statement is bizarre on at least two counts: they had just suggested that Black was playing for a draw, but now, in a worse position, he's not? And second, the game winds up in a rook ending after all, and Capa wins it. If the Tartakower quote was meant ironically, that would be one thing, but there's nothing about the context suggesting that it was. (Perhaps this is a failure of translation?)

For a while these quirks and errors drove me slightly crazy, but the book's pluses eventually won me over. Overall, I think the book is worth getting for those with any interest in chess history in general and Capablanca in particular - especially if this is your first book about him. I do hope that Russell Enterprises puts out a second edition at some point, cleaning up all the errors and perhaps redoing the annotations.

Ordering information here and here.