Tal Memorial, Round 4: Five Draws (UPDATED: Annotated Games Now Included)
No time today for game analysis, at least right now, so I'll just report the results and my superficial impressions for now and leave it at that. [UPDATE: I've since annotated the games - see link at the bottom.]
Nakamura briefly had Kramnik on the ropes, but it was a crazy position and Kramnik escaped. Gelfand - Grischuk was also crazy, and judging by Grischuk's body language at the end he must have felt that he had Gelfand at one point.
Mamedyarov - Aronian was less wild and at least superficially didn't seem to have one player or the other miss any big chances. That game ended relatively quickly, unlike Karjakin - Shirov and Wang Hao - Eljanov. In both cases Black (the two 0-3 players) had to suffer a long time before scraping out their half points.
Standings After Round 4:
1. Aronian 3
2-6. Karjakin, Wang Hao, Mamedyarov, Nakamura, Grischuk 2.5
7. Kramnik 2
8. Gelfand 1.5
9-10. Shirov, Eljanov .5
Round 5 Pairings (on Wednesday; tomorrow is a rest day):
Shirov - Nakamura
Aronian - Karjakin
Grischuk - Mamedyarov
Eljanov - Gelfand
Kramnik - Wang Hao
Reader Comments (4)
No. We demand analysis! Who's with me??
:)
Not me.
Maybe Hikaru Nakamura's tweet about his game says all that can be said... Kramnik himself kept asking for the engine evaluation while they were analyzing, according to ChessVibes. Gotta give props to Nakamura for creating such a dangerous position out of Kramnik's Petroff.
[DM: I was fortunate to have the time to watch their press conference after the game, and while I can understand his curiosity it was a little sad to me to see Kramnik keep asking what the engine said. On the other point, it seems to me time for Kramnik and Gelfand to try something else against 1.e4, at least sometimes, as they practically never get winning chances with the Petroff (not that they're trying to, but why not?) and have been far from bulletproof with it the past 3 years or so. (In Kramnik's case this isn't a suggestion for more of the Pirc, which should probably die its ignominious death.)]
I can't recall where I saw it but Kramnik very recently said that he played the Petroff because he wanted to make drawing against 1 e4 an automatic process. And they said Karpov was the anti-hero...
[DM: Not sure this Karpov/anti-hero stuff is doing here (and anyway, even Kasparov was often quite happy to draw with Black), but as we've seen over and over in chess history, there is no draw death in chess - even for those who want it!]