Games of Interest in Today's European Club Cup Action

No time to annotate or post the games, but after a quick look at some of the top boards I'd suggest interested readers have a look at Jakovenko-Gelfand, Tomashevsky-Ponomariov and Petrosian-Shirov. The first game was a nice endgame win by Jakovenko, demonstrating just how important activity in the endgame can be. The second was a brutal attacking performance by Tomashevsky, and the latter was a remarkable triumph of caveman chess by Shirov.

Event website here - enjoy!

Comments

[Eyal]

A remarkable thing about Jakovenko-Gelfand is that Jakovenko went for a position that was considered as drawn in a recent Radjabov-Kramnik game from the candidates (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1621784) – with 36…Kg8 they’ve reached the same position as after 30 moves in that game (Jakovenko inserted some extra checks, hence the difference in the move count), and instead of forcing a draw by perpetual, as Radjabov did, Jakovenko continued to play it out with 37.h3 (the novelty!)

[Eupseiphos]

World champ Anand, World Champ Challenger Gelfand, world #1 rated Carlsen, and women's world champ Hou all lost today.

[Graham]

Gelfand plays the Lasker QGD which has brought Anand success. Nakamura-Anand the other day saw Vishy black in a line which has served Gelfand well, e.g. against Kasamdzhanov who is in team Anand....The battle lines are slowly being drawn for next year?

[Tom]

Thanks Eyal.
Jakovenko was playing so quickly he had almost two hours on his clock at one time, before the time control. Gelfand was almost at the same pace. Maybe he thought they would just play the draw ? And then entering the endgame Gelfand took almost one hour to make two moves (moving the king before the pawns).
Nice example of preparation to the endgame. Wait, wasn't that a post a few days back ? ;-)

[Eyal]

@ Tom: Yeah, Jakovenko is a superb endgame player in general, and it’s not the first time he’s done something like that… I recall that 3 years ago he beat Wang Yue in a bishop endgame resulting from the Berlin Wall (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1528296) which was basically the same as one which Wang Yue drew earlier that year against both Adams (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1510978) and Almasi (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1517158) – not an exact repetition of moves, but compare the position after 27.Kxh1 in Jakovenko’s game with that after 29.Kxh3 in the Adams game and 28.Kxh2 in the Almasi game; so that’s basically where the preparation started (a key idea, if I’m not mistaken, was to avoid an early c4).