Shanghai Masters, Round 1
Friday, September 3, 2010 at 2:33PM Levon Aronian is the early leader of this high-level qualifier, thanks to his win over Wang Hao. Wang Hao essayed an unimpressive line of the Catalan, and by the time theory had been left behind Black was already slightly better. Aronian made progress a little at a time until his opponent played 34.d5??; after that, and the related follow-up blunder 35.Bh3, it was over.
Vladimir Kramnik had some chances in the other game, against Alexei Shirov, but he missed a nice tactical chance on move 25. Shirov had to suffer a while, but he gradually saved the game a pawn down in a rooks and opposite-colored bishops ending.
Given the "Bilbao" scoring, Aronian leads with 3 points. Kramnik and Shirov have one point apiece, and Wang Hao has the "traditional" zero.
Reader Comments (4)
Wang Hao played against this variation before and lost a pawn but was able to get a draw. See Wang Hao (2722)-Efimenko,Z (2677)/Sarajevo BIH 2010. It looked like he deviated from that game 1st so why he had such a poor game seems puzzling.
TWIC has the Wang Hao game as a 'Blumenfeld Counter Gambit' - a mistake I guess. Never heard of that one.
[DM: Looks like a strange glitch in Mark's ECO classification program. But write him about it, not me, so he can fix it! Btw, the Blumenfeld is a real opening, even if it's not the one that occurred in the game. It typically begins 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 c5 4.d5 b5.]
Dennis,
I was going to shoot you an email regarding this Kramnik - Shirov (1) game but your post gives it wider interest. As an alternative to Shirov's 15 ... f5 you cite the only other game to date where Kramnik's 15 Bd3 occurred, namely Antic (2519 - Fontaine (2507) 2005 Vrnjacka Banja SCG following 15 ... Bd7 16 0-0 Rc8 17 f3 f6 18 Bf2 h5 (1/2-1/2, 37). My complaint is with the annotations to the same game by an unknown (or at least unidentified) annotator at ChessBase. There the comment after 15 Bd3 reads, "Kramnik's move has only been played once before, but not with such credentials..." The only note to Shirov's 15 ... f5 is the symbol "N" - novelty.
This annotator mentions the existence of this one other game but does not feel the need to cite it, despite its obvious relevance (theoretical success for Black at 2500+ level), presumably because it wasn't played by members of the elite. This conforms with the trend for only notating a new move as a novelty only when it is played by someone over 2700, based on the unstated reason that a "new" move lacks meaning until it is given some sort of imprimatur, or legitimacy, at the very top level. Of course, I can understand disregarding or screening out club player games up to 2200 level but the trend seems to be getting more extreme. My complaint is that this snobbish approach to annotating slights the achievements of even titled players, while those "journeyman masters" under 2400 may as well have their faces on milk cartons ("Have you seen me?"). But perhaps I make too much of this.
Btw, this line of the Cambridge Springs QGD (through 15 f3, at least) is given as the repertoire choice in any number of repertoire books in recent years but Ivanchuk played a model game to draw Carlsen (Leon 2009) in the other game cited. Another very recent game worth noting is Smeets, J. (2669) - Illescas Cordoba, M. (2591) 2010 Sestao ESP: 15 f3 Nf5 16 Bf2 and now 16 ... cd4 N (16 ... Ba6) 17 ed4 e5 18 de5 Nxe5 19 c5 0-0 20 Be2 Rd8 21 Nc4 Nd3 22 Bxd3 Rxd3 23 cb6 Ba6 24 0-0 1/2-1/2. The Cambridge Springs lives!
Greg,
I tend to agree, at least somewhat, with both you and the anti-"milk carton" master snobs. Non-GMs can certainly play good games and find good moves in their home prep. Absolutely right. But their games and prep, compared to those of super-GMs, tends to be a far lower level. So I do look when some rare move was first played by a relatively weak human, but generally speaking, though not always, they seem to do it without the deep concept the super-GM had in mind. (Or sometimes it's at least possible that they had it in mind, but their fellow non-elite opponent immediately took the game in a totally different direction.)
As for the Cambridge Springs, I think it's on pretty shaky ground. My prediction is that we won't see a super-GM playing it the rest of the year (or if he does, he'll either lose or obviously suffer a lot).