The Daily Update: Poikovsky and Saratov
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 1:31AM The Karpov tournament in Poikovsky finished with some more short draws, but also a couple of wins, one of which was very important for the final standings. Etienne Bacrot defeated Zahar Efimenko - with Black, no less - and caught up with Sergey Karjakin to tie for first place. (I wonder if they used tiebreaks to separate them: maybe fewest moves per draw would be fitting for this event.) Both players wound up on +2: two wins and seven draws, to be precise.
Meanwhile, Alexander Morozevich keeps putting on a show in the Governor's Cup in Saratov. After four straight wins he was finally held to a second draw today by Alexei Shirov, but just barely. Their game was incredibly sharp and flashy, and certainly worth your having a look. With 5/6 (TPR: 2980) Morozevich leads Peter Leko, Evgeny Alekseev and Evgeny Tomashevsky by a point and a half (and everyone else there by even more).
Bacrot, Karjakin, Morozevich
Reader Comments (5)
Apparently Bacrot was declared first on tiebreak - second time this year after Bazna that Karjakin "loses" by a whopping 0.25 Sonneborn-Berger points. Only a French source (europe-echecs.com) seems to attach some significance to it: "Etienne Bacrot and Sergey Karjakin finish ex-æquo in first place of this prestigious tournament, but the Frenchman has the edge on tiebreak !" [their exclamation mark].
Quite different from Bazna, when many Carlsen fans (and some webpages) pretended that Carlsen was the one and only winner of the event.
The game Motylev-Karjakin from the final round of Poikovsky very much encapsulates the spirit of this tournament. It was a 30 move draw which, to someone who isn’t familiar with Marshall theory, might look interesting, but in fact a pseudo-game since they’ve just repeated a drawing sequence played almost a decade ago by Ponomariov and Anand (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1250157 – well, technically White’s 28th move is different and the perpetual check isn’t actually played there on the board, but of course it doesn’t make any real difference). A look in the databases shows that they aren’t even the first to copy that game… Since Motylev, who is Karjakin’s trainer/second, was just a point behind going into the last round and so with the possibility of sharing first place in case of a win, it was really nice of him not to challenge Karjakin with White at all and gift him half a point like that; all part of the “domestic and very pleasant atmosphere” of the tournament that he mentioned in an interview (http://whychess.org/node/2351), I suppose.
Btw, it’s been reported that Bacrot won on tiebreak (see the above whychess link or http://www.russiachess.org/news/all/bacrot_won_a_tournament_named_after_karpov_poikovsky/) – I suppose it was Sonnenborn-Berger.
More boring draws ... we should watch the ladies instead .... playing chess that is, in Nalchik. Zhu Chen is 5 from 5. Interesting to see what happens when she goes up against Stefanova and the Kostinsevas.
Nice to see Moro playing so well.
@Eyal: It's OK to "comment" on and be unhappy with the number of draws, particularly the number of short and/or premature draws. For what it's worth, Motylev gave another explanation which may or may not be an excuse: "One of the reasons for the high number of draws was that 7 out of 10 of the players in the tournament had come to Poikovsky immediately after the European Club Cup. We were tired, of course."
But I think it's unfair to single out Motylev and Karjakin, partly because it's at least unclear who was gifting a draw to whom. Yes, their draw may have been prearranged or in any case both players were happy with the result - Karjakin played the Marshall only once before!
Looking at their previous games there are three more short draws, the only decisive game was at the 2010 Russian Team Championship when team interest may have prevailed over personal friendship. Karjakin with black "pretended" to aim for the Marshall but didn't go for it (7.Bb3 0-0 8.c3 d6), Motylev later went for a sacrificial kingside attack that was refuted by Karjakin. If they had played a similar game in the last round of Poikovsky, people might smell a rat suspecting that Motylev gifted the full point to make Karjakin sole first? And how realistic were Motylev's winning chances given that he's 80 points lower-rated?
So maybe what they did was the best they could do under the circumstances. And arguably it's still better to provide some fake entertainment rather than simply trading off pieces quickly to reach a dead-drawn endgame.
@Thomas: One of the reasons I’ve singled out the Motylev-Karjakin game is precisely because *fake* entertainment, as you call it, is harder to recognize than “simply trading off pieces quickly to reach a dead-drawn endgame”, and therefore its fake nature is worth pointing out to those who might miss it. In fact, I find it the more annoying and cynical of the two options, but I suppose that’s a matter of personal taste.
Another reason is that the circumstances of a final round dramatize the lack of competitive spirit evident in this game. And under the circumstances, I think it’s clear that Motylev should be perceived as the one gifting the draw to Karjakin, because 1.Motylev was White and 2.Half a point guaranteed Karjakin at least a shared first. Moreover, Motylev wasn’t even doing badly at the tournament, which might have explained a lack of ambition in the final round; on the contrary, he had an equal score, and – as I mentioned – a win might have even allowed him a shared first if the results of the other games turned out a certain way (well, they didn’t with Bacrot, but of course he couldn’t have known in advance that Bacrot would win with Black). So if Motylev was really “happy” with the result, this just makes his approach to the game more pathetic. And I find all the excuses you’re making up for the two unconvincing – if Motylev really thinks that it’s unrealistic for him to even try and play for a win with *White* against a player rated 80 points higher, then he shouldn’t play in tournaments with stronger players at all (but I’m sure he doesn’t really think that in general); and if the pair’s “personal friendship” is really such a huge obstacle for playing in a normal, competitive manner against each other (which might be the case), then they shouldn’t be invited to the same round-robin tournaments in the first place – or have the decency not to appear together in case they receive such invitations.