Anand Wins Botvinnik Memorial
Sunday, September 4, 2011 at 1:40AM Viswanathan Anand continued his winning ways on the second day of the elite rapid event of the Botvinnik Memorial, following up a draw with Vladimir Kramnik by defeating Levon Aronian and Magnus Carlsen. He wound up with an undefeated 4.5/6 score, a full point and a half more than Vladimir Kramnik and Levon Aronian. Kramnik beat Carlsen in round 5 while Aronian beat Carlsen in round 4; finally, Aronian beat Kramnik in the last round to catch him. As you'll have gathered, Carlsen "castled queenside"; that is, he lost all three of his games (0-0-0) and finished in last overall with just a point and a half.
The concurrent women's event was won by Viktoria Cmilyte, who lost her first game (on Friday) and the last game (on Saturday) but won all four intervening contests. Elina Danielan took second with 3.5, Tatiana Kosintseva third with 2.5 and Humpy Koneru was last with 2 points.
After those events finished, they played a round of tandem chess, with the following generally nationally-based teams: Anand & Koneru, Kramnik & Kosintseva, Aronian & Danielan and Carlsen & Cmilyte. Anand & Koneru had White (in all games, the women moved first for both sides) in their first two rounds and won with it against first Kramnik's team and then Aronian's before drawing with Black against Carlsen & Cmilyte. Aronian & Danielan won with White against Carlsen's team in round 1 and Kramnik's in round 3; finally, Kramnik & Kosintseva drew with White against Carlsen & Cmilyte in round 2.
You can watch all the proceedings here. The games in all three events were quite lively and interesting, and contrary to at least one opinion I've seen about the men's event, reasonably well played, too, and I hope to present one or two of the event games either on here or in one of my upcoming video shows.
Reader Comments (4)
Hi Dennis, any plans to annotate games from this event? Carlsen-Aronian and Anand-Aronian were quite interesting!
[DM: Hmm, if only I had answered your question in the post...maybe in the last sentence.]
Where can the videos of the players in-game comments be found? Are they even in English? I went to the event website but I can't navigate it.
[DM: This is a weird mini-trend: two straight comments asking questions already answered in the post! The link given in the post takes you straight to the page, and the video box is right there, smack in the middle of the page. Just hit the play button. I don't know the exact times for the player comments, but they were generally in the late opening/early middlegame. Just move the slider a bit at a time, and you're bound to find them. (I just did and found the first interruption - go to 15:23:00 or so for Kramnik speaking (in Russian) while Anand has headphones on; once Kramnik finishes, a bit before 15:26, Anand then takes his turn - in English. Then Humpy Koneru and Tatiana Kosintseva comment on their game, and then everyone resumes play. Not everyone comments about every game.)]
In my defense, I checked the post again to see if I missed anything and I still don't see any specific comment about the videos I was referring to in my question. You did say "You can watch all the proceedings here." but I assumed that was referring to the previously mentioned items which didn't include a mention of the videos. Also, you often embed videos in the post when there are some of interest. So with the lack of mention of the videos and the absence of any videos embedded I felt the question was justified without me clicking on the link since I figured it just contained the things actually mentioned in the post which didn't interest me enough for me to click the link. Anyway, thanks for answering my question in more detail once I asked it!
About the comments during the game. They weren't as interesting as I expected. It also seemed like it would be an annoying distraction to the other players. I thought they would have them go into another room for the comments but they did it right by all the other games so everyone (except their opponent) could hear them. So I don't think this will continue to any other events.
[DM: Sure, it's hard to believe this will happen in any kind of serious event. But it would be nice if they work on this for future exhibition events, or do what they did for the old BBC Master Games, if they can keep the game scores from the public while they do the voice-over recordings.]
That's actually what I was hoping for, them to be like the BBC Master Games. When you linked to them I found them really instructive and I watched all of them. It would be nice for them to start something like that again. Also, all of their comments were recorded after the game was over, so there wasn't a distracting break in the middle of the game. I don't know if it's necessary to keep the game scores from the public though. The comments still add plenty of value that the viewer can't get from putting the game into their chess engine. So I would still tune in even if the game scores are available before the videos come out.