The Daily Update: Dortmund, Biel, Computers

In Dortmund, it's looking like Ruslan Ponomariov will be the winner. Le Quang Liem pushed against Mamedyarov, but couldn't win, and Leko - Kramnik was everything we thought it would be; i.e., nothing. But Ponomariov outplayed Naiditsch in good style, and he leads by a full point with two rounds to go.

In Biel, there was a shakeup atop the leaderboard. Wesley So had been leading, but he was defeated by Fabiano Caruana, and now it's Caruana who leads with 3.5 out of 5. So is half a point back, as are Dmitry Andreikin, Evgeny Tomashevsky, and Maxim Rodshtein, who defeated Anish Giri in the day's other decisive game.

Finally, the current computer match is tied at 3-3. Stockfish 1.8 won the first game, Houdini 1.3 the second, and the next four games were drawn. Note: I probably won't mention these matches any longer, except (if I'm reminded) when one ends and another one begins.

No annotated games today - sorry - I have too much else to do. But I do recommend that readers have a look at the decisive games from Dortmund and Biel, as they were all quite interesting.

This Week's ChessVideos Show: Tactics in the Benoni

In this week's ChessVideos show, I take a look back at an old game of mine (from the 1980s, around the time dirt was invented). When rediscovering it for myself a week or so ago, it seemed that there were several very interesting moments in the game. I spent several enjoyable hours going through it before flipping on the silicon beast to check my findings, and I hope you'll find it both entertaining and a good workout as well. (And maybe instructive, too, if you play or face the Modern Benoni.)

Have a look here. The show is free (free registration is required) and will be available on-demand for the next month or so.

The Daily Update: Dortmund, Biel, Computer Matches

In theory, Kramnik had an excellent opportunity in Dortmund to fight for his tenth title there. In practice, nothing of the sort. While he had White against Ponomariov, and a win would put him in a tie for first with Ponomariov and Le Quang Liem, he never got even a whiff of an advantage - Ponomariov drew with ease. Likewise with Quang Liem, who succeeded with Black in neutralizing Naiditsch's chances.

In the third game, we had blood on the board - Leko's, once again. Mamedyarov broke his losing streak with a confident win, outplaying Leko with White in an English with surprising ease. What in the world has happened to Leko, anyway? Other than Adams for a couple of years after getting massacred by Hydra, I can't remember seeing a consistent top-level player disappear so fast from his elite status. (That's not to say that I enjoy watching Leko in super-tournaments - I don't. [Does anyone?] But that doesn't mean I want him to start playing badly.)

Standings After Round 7:

1. Ponomariov 4.5

2-3. Le Quang Liem, Mamedyarov 4

4. Kramnik 3.5

5. Naiditsch 3

6. Leko 2

Round 8 Pairings:

Leko - Kramnik (Can't wait for that one!)

Ponomariov - Naiditsch

Le Quang Liem - Mamedyarov

Tournament site here; games, with my comments, here.

Biel: Four draws today and one win. The draws were generally pretty short (well, they're young guys - it's not as if they have any energy...or maybe they're using it on other things?), and even the one win was pretty short. Andreikin rolled Howell in just 30 moves, and that was good enough to bring him to within half a point of first. So continues to lead with 3/4, half a point ahead of Andreikin, Tomashevsky and Caruana.

Computer matches: Rybka 4 finished off Stockfish 1.8 last night or early this morning, 29-19, and now Rybka's victims are starting a match. (Rybka beat Houdini 1.02 26.5-21.5 prior to the Stockfish match.) Stockfish 1.8 is playing a slightly newer release of Houdini - 1.03a - and so far it's 1-1 in this best of 32 (not 48) game match.

Note: This new match is very loosely based on Magnus Carlsen's repertoire, and while the choices were mostly and ultimately Martin Thoresen's, I did have some input on the selection as well. The aim was to have a diverse set of openings that would give rise to position-types typical of human chess; hopefully we succeeded!

The Daily Update: Dortmund, Biel, and Rybka-Stockfish

The three games in Dortmund today were a study in contrast. Two of the three games were uninspired draws, while the last game was a weird and wacky blunderfest. If a weird virus were to erase Leko - Ponomariov and Le Quang Liem - Kramnik from the world's computers, no one would ever notice, so I won't say anything more about them. Mamedyarov - Naiditsch is a game White probably wishes a virus would wipe out, but alas, you'll have your chance to see it first. After some weird transpositions and a Naiditsch bailout, White obtained a very pleasant edge pretty much for free. Mamedyarov was almost always better and was even winning once or twice, but he repeatedly let Naiditsch off the hook. (Time trouble was almost surely a big factor in this.) Still, he was always at least equal until his very last move, which was an outright blunder giving up the exchange for nothing. Disgusted, he resigned without even waiting to see whether Naiditsch might have suffered the same hallucination he did.

That game, with my notes, can be replayed here. As a service to insomniacs, I also give the other two games, but without annotations.

Standings After Round 6:

1. Ponomariov 4

2. Le Quang Liem (!) 3.5

3-4. Kramnik, Mamedyarov 3

5. Naiditsch 2.5

6. Leko 2

In Biel, So beat Rodshtein and Caruana beat Negi (quickly), in both cases with Black. So is thus in clear first with 2.5/3, half a point ahead of Caruana and Tomashevsky.

Finally, the Rybka 4 - Stockfish 1.8 match is almost over. Assuming Stockfish converts its currently winning position, the score will be 28-19 in favor of Rybka 4 with one game to go.

The Daily Update: Shankland Wins the US Junior Championship; Biel, Rybka vs. Stockfish Continue

Congratulations to the allegedly retiring Sam Shankland, who overcame an 0-2 start to win the U.S. Junior Championship in a playoff. In the first game, he beat Parker Zhao with a tactics-intensive attack - not too surprising, as he had White and outrated Zhao by a pretty serious margin. In the finale, he had Black against tournament favorite Ray Robson, but that seemed to go even easier. Robson played the Fantasy Variation against Shankland's Caro-Kann but didn't have much of a clue as to how to handle it. In addition to Black's draw-odds advantage, Shankland also quickly gained a huge time advantage and a superior position on the board as well. Robson did well to get a pawn down ending, but down to seconds whatever last chances he had evaporated after a blunder.

Congratulations again to Shankland, not only for winning but for his fine play and his competitive toughness.

Next, Biel. Rodshtein-Caruana was a short draw and Son-Howell was relatively short as well, but the other games were monsters. So against Vachier-Lagrave went 64 moves before they split the point, and in the longest game of the day by moves (but not by time!) Giri tried for 109 moves but couldn't break Andreikin in a rook and pawn vs. bishop and pawn ending. The one decisive game of the day was a queen ending between Tomashevsky and Negi, won by the former in "just" 94 moves.

Tomashevsky thus catches round 1 winners So and Rodshtein in a tie for first with 1.5/2.

Finally, the Rybka 4 - Stockfish 1.8 match continues. Game 42, reported last night as a win for Rybka, was annulled as it was based on a Stockfish crash. Stockfish drew the replay and finally got off the 15-game schneid by winning game 43. The match thus stands at 25.5-17.5 in Rybka's favor.

There's no Dortmund news, as they had their rest day, but they resume today (Wednesday) at 3 p.m. CET (9 a.m. ET).

Who Do I Write Like?

Why, it's elementary, my dear Watson!

HT: Brian Karen

The Daily Update: Biel; US Women's, Junior Championships; Rybka vs. Stockfish (UPDATED)

The "Young Grandmasters Tournament" in Biel started today; here are the results:

Rodshtein - Negi 1-0

Andreikin - Son 1/2-1/2

Giri - Tomashevsky 1/2-1/2

Vachier-Lagrave - Caruana 1/2-1/2

Howell - So 0-1

The U.S. Women's Championship had been a two-player race between Anna Zatonskih and Irina Krush, with Zatonskih either in clear or shared first in every round...until the very end. She was unable to beat Sabina Foisor, but Krush beat Abby Marshall to take clear first with 8/9. Zatonskih was half a point behind - tied, surprisingly, with Tatev Abrahamyan. (They were three points ahead of their nearest pursuers.) It was an excellent performance by the top three.

There's also a top three in the U.S. Junior Championship, but they're tied and in need of a playoff. GM Ray Robson started half a point ahead of Parker Zhao and a point ahead of IM Sam Shankland. Shankland had lost his first two games but caught fire after that, going 5/6 before the last round, and then crushing Conrad Holt to finish with 6 points. Robson had a disaster, losing to Warren Harper, which cleared the way for Zhao. Zhao had a winning endgame against John Daniel Bryant, but let him escape a bishop and two pawns vs. knight ending with a draw. (The difficulties arose because of wrong-colored bishop and rook-pawn worries.)

I'll update this when I know more; meanwhile, here's the website for both of these US championship events.

**UPDATE** The playoffs will be Tuesday at 10 a.m. St. Louis time (= 11 a.m. ET, 5 p.m. CET), and you can find the procedure here.

Finally, it was a competitive match for a while, but now it's a cooking show with Rybka 4 playing the part of the rolling pin and Stockfish 1.8 as the pizza dough. The 48 game match continues, but it's 26-16. Stockfish has gone winless the last 15 games, with eight losses interspersed over that stretch.

Informant 104-106 on CD: A Briefer Review

To get the whole Informant concept and my general thoughts and feelings about it, read the previous post. The same sections are given here, too; all I'll add by way of specific information is that the "best of" players in Informants 104-106 are the FIDE knockout champions other than Anand: Khalifman, Ponomariov and Kasimdzhanov.

My assessment of this product differs slightly from the book version, because it's much, much, much more convenient to replay these games on the computer, from the comfort of ChessBase (or any normal database program: the disc gives the games and other sections in the ChessBase, Chess Assistant, and generic PGN formats in addition to their own proprietary format). In this format, I'd give the product 4 stars (out of 5). My only complaint is that one must wait a while before the publishers put it out on disc. They do publish the Informants one at a time, but then it's only in their proprietary format, which means you can't integrate it with your ChessBase (or Chess Assistant, etc.) databases unless you've bought their special program for that very purpose. So it's not as timely as it could be, which isn't so relevant for the combination, endgame and biography sections and not always so bad with respect to the annotated games; for the theory, however, it's obviously a potential problem. On balance, though, I like it - but subscribe to ChessBase Magazine first!

Ordering information here.

Informant 107: A Brief Review

The Informant, as I have written before, was to players of a previous generation what a product like ChessBase's MegaDatabase is to us today. Specifically, both offered important games and high-quality annotations, and in a timely way available not only to elites but to the general chess public.

Of course, this historical analogy may be of some (small) interest, but - the reader might ask - now that we have databases and high-quality annotations practically everywhere -  why should anyone now bother to purchase the latest Informant.

The answer, I think - what it is that it does that nothing else does - is that it tries to provide all and only the best in chess from the period in question. Where TWIC offers up something like 2000 new games a week, on average, Informant 107 offers just 295 games for the period from September to December of 2009. Indeed, the number is even smaller than that, as a pretty fair number (though a minority) of the "games" end once the theoretical value comes to an end. But those nearly 300 games are all well-annotated, and 160 of them feature at least one player in the world's top 50.

It's not just well-annotated games, however. Even if the Informant offers more annotated games than are generally available in cyberspace, they would still be just one more contestant in a crowded market without offering anything new. So their publishers have tried to incorporate a pretty fair number of bells and whistles to complement the game section.

First, each volume starts with the results of the voting for the best game and the most important novelty of the previous volume, and then the winning entries are (re-) presented. Better still, the game with the winning novelty is used as the basis for reworking that section of ECO (the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, put out by the same people). Thus in Informant 106 (the previous volume), the game with the most noteworthy novelty, according to the voters, was Morozevich - Vachier-Lagrave from Biel 2009. (You might remember the game for V-L's horrible rook boxed in on h8 for the longest time, though the novelty was Moro's.) So in this issue, the game is republished with the original notes, and then there are three pages of tabular data for the relevant section of ECO code B80.

The games section follows (divided into two parts: the first including only games played by people on the top 50 list for either September or November 2009, the second for everyone else - but almost exclusively GMs), and then after a couple of indexes we have the combination section. There are 18 puzzles for your solving pleasure, followed by another 18 positions taken from endgames and 9 new studies as well. This makes for excellent training material, naturally.

The traditional list of the major FIDE-rated events follows, and then three theoretical sections follow. The first covers the 3...Qd6 Scandinavian, the second the Dragon with 9.0-0-0 d5 with 10.Kb1 and 10.exd5, and the third looks at Smyslov's Anti-Gruenfeld line 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.Bd2.

There follows a mini-Informant on Carlsen, presenting 27 of his best games, 19 of his best opening ideas (this often carries well into the middlegame, and sometimes the whole game is given), 27 of his best combinations (presented as puzzles) and nine endgame positions to solve as well.

Penultimately - felix culpa - there's a correction of a misprinted game from the previous volume, and that's good news for us, as the game was the runner-up in the "best novelty" contest and a top-ten finisher for best game as well. And finally, and sadly, there's a one-page essay - in English, not symbols - in memory of Vassily Smyslov.

All in all, it's a good collection of material, suitable for opening research, training, and pleasure. Should you get it? Do I recommend it? To the average club player, the answer is no - at least not unless you're a real junkie. The annotations are all in symbols and aren't meant to offer instruction per se, so there are much better sources for you. (This blog, for example!) I'd say that the target audience is 1800 (as a generous estimate; 1900-2000 is a more conservative guess) and up. So do I recommend it to 1800+ players? Well, I wouldn't call it a necessity, but it's useful and worthwhile, and for $32-36 bucks (plus shipping) it's a very good value compared to the typical game collection - as long as you don't miss the verbal commentary too much. In the lingo of stars, I'd give it 3 or 3.5 out of 5.

Ordering info here.

Dortmund 2010, Round 5: Ponomariov Beats Mamedyarov, Leads

It was a very nice round today in Dortmund, with three decisive games. Sometimes Dortmund seems like a sort of Leko Memorial - not because he's dead, fortunately, but because the spirit of dull draws sometimes overtakes it. Unfortunately, it might be turning into a Leko Memorial of a different sort - he's playing so far like his career as an elite GM is at an end. He's still a pretty young guy (he's 30), so he has plenty of time to reinvent himself once or twice more and again seriously contend for the title.

But back to the tournament! After Ponomariov's loss yesterday, he fell half a point behind Mamedyarov. Today that was remedied in their head-to-head matchup, as Ponomariov gradually broke him down in an ending with each side having a rook, bishop and knight. At the start it was nearly even, but Ponomariov has had a well-deserved reputation as a grinder since his early teens, and his technical prowess paid off. He's now in clear first at the end of the first cycle with 3.5/5.

Mamedyarov is in second with 3/5, and he's joined there by tournament newcomer Le Quang Liem, who won his second straight game. He flat out outplayed Leko on the Black side of an Advance Caro-Kann, proving that his structural advantages meant more than Leko's prospects for developing an initiative.

Finally, and finally, Kramnik got his first win of the event, beating Naiditsch on the white side of a Catalan. Kramnik chose a pawn-grab line, and his opponent was unable to maintain his compensation. The key moment came when Naiditsch decided to "win" the exchange; in fact, this left him in a terrible position with a permanently offside rook that eventually cost him the game. The win brought Kramnik back to 50%, while Naiditsch and Leko are in the cellar with 1.5/5.

I believe tomorrow will be a rest day, and then they'll have their second round-robin starting Wednesday.

Tournament site here, games (with my notes) here.