Dortmund 2012, Round 8: A Five-Way Tie For First With One Round To Go
Saturday, July 21, 2012 at 2:52PM
Dennis Monokroussos in Dortmund 2012, Dortmund 2012

Sadly, a 10-way tie for first won't be possible at the 2012 edition of Dortmund, but a 6-way tie is a theoretical possibility!

Recapping today's action, let's start with the draws. Daniel Fridman played a fun gambit line of the Catalan against Arkadij Naiditsch. After 10 moves he had sacrificed three pawns, then "lent" a knight and gave away a further exchange to boot. It was a known position, but it's still startling to see White down a rook, knight and pawn after 15 moves, and only able to immediately recapture a bishop. However, the players were just following a game Miroshnichenko (2684) - Kasimdzhanov (2699) from the Turkish Team Championship in 2010, and the first new move was 18.Qb6. Inevitably the position clarified with White finishing up a pawn down for good compensation, and Naiditsch found a nice solution on move 24, sacrificing the exchange for a pawn. That broke White's control of the position and led to an easily drawn ending, putting Naiditsch at 5/8.

Also at five points is Sergey Karjakin, who drew in a Slow Slav against Georg Meier. Most of the board was locked up by pawn chains, but with a bit more space Meier tried to engineer a breakthrough. First he tried the kingside, and that led to the exchange of all the heavy pieces; then he switched to the queenside, but without success.

Now for the wins. The speediest win came when Peter Leko defeated Mateusz Bartel with White in a "Poisoned Pawn" Winawer. (I have no idea why it's called that, except that people lazily refer to any capture of a knight's pawn by the queen in the opening as a "poisoned pawn". No matter that White's queen is soon on d3 and completely safe, or that it grabs a second pawn as well. Apparently the g-pawn is "poisoned" but the h-pawn isn't.) Bartel's decision to go into this line was interesting, as he generally meets 3.Nc3 in the French with 3...Nf6, and on the four occasions in the database when he was faced with the position after 3...Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3 Ne7 7.Qg4 he had opted for 7...Kf8. Perhaps he was influenced by Leko's round 4 game with Caruana, which was also a Winawer. Leko-Bartel continued 7...Ne7 8.Qxg7 Rg8 9.Qxh7 cxd4 10.Ne2 dxc3 11.f4 Nbc6 and now rather than 12.Qd3, as he played against Caruana (and has been played more than 1100 times in the database), he played the very rare 12.h4 instead.

Caruana had met Leko's 12.Qd3 with the enterprising 12...d4, and it's not clear to me that Black can't play 12...d4 against 12.h4 as well. Bartel chose the more conventional 12...Bd7, and after 13.h5 0-0-0 14.Qd3 Leko had reached a known but comparatively minor variation normally achieved via 12.Qd3. Even more minor, in the big database scheme of things, was Leko's 17.Be3. The engine thinks the simplest way to deal with the bishop is to swap it off, but perhaps Bartel was concerned that the h-pawn might survive after 17...Nxe3 18.Qxe3 Rg7 19.Qd3, but 19...Ne7 followed by ...Ng6 or ...Nf5 (as the position warrants) rounds up the pawn and leaves Black in good shape.

Instead, Bartel played 19...d4, committing himself to the likely loss of material but hoping to blow open the center against White's king. This didn't quite work out, and after 26.Bc5 material was equal but White's bishops and Black's weak f-pawns gave Leko a very, very pleasant ending. Five moves later White was a pawn up and winning, and just two moves after that Bartel's king was in a mating net, and he was forced to resign.

So Leko was able to parlay his good fortune against Vladimir Kramnik yesterday (and the accompanying psychological boost) into a win today, and he joined the tie for first at five points.

As for Kramnik...his momentum continued in the opposite direction. He faced Fabiano Caruana today, and their game was a Berlin "Declined" (i.e. 4.d3 vs. the Berlin), and Kramnik repeated the rare 7...Ne7 he had employed earlier this year against Levon Aronian in their match. Aronian met this with 8.h3; Caruana chose the more obvious 8.d4, and after 8...exd4 9.cxd4 Bb6 played a new move, 10.b3. (Admittedly, there weren't many predecessors to build on, and none of them were within 400 points of him.)

Kramnik's position seemed alright, but the game started turning in Caruana's favor after Black's 18th move. White's idea was to play 19.b5 and follow with Ng5, so some sort of prophylaxis was called for - either 18...a6 or 18...h6, for example. Not doing so gave White an edge, and when he failed to play 24...Qxd7 that edge grew bigger. It's a little surprising that the right move was to draw the passed pawn even further up the board, but the issue is that Black had better control over d8 as a blockading square than he did over e7.

Soon Kramnik was completely tied up, and 35.Rxe4! marked the beginning of the end. (It might have been close to the middle or even the end of the end had he continued with 36.Re1, too.) The real end came on move 38. Kramnik had to play 38...Kg6 or 38...Kh6 and been willing to bid adieu to the a-pawn for nothing (if Caruana wanted to take it by trading on c5 first). If White played 39.Rxa7, then 39...Nxe6 would keep Black in the game. Unfortunately for Kramnik, he played the immediate 38...Nxe6, but now White didn't take on a7; instead, he played 39.Bd3+, and Kramnik was completely lost. 39...g6 allows mate in one (40.Rh8#), but his 39...Kh6 left his king in something close to a mating net anyway. Kramnik was forced to surrender the exchange a few moves later, and the rest was easy technique for Caruana (send him back!), who won and joined the big tie for first with five points. (Kramnik stayed at four and a half, finally falling out of at least shared first for the first time since round 2.)

Finally, Ruslan Ponomariov ground out a win with Black against poor Jan Gustafsson. A 6.Qc2 Anti-Meran reached a bishop vs. knight ending after just 29 moves. Normally one would prefer the bishop, but as White had a dark-squared bishop and his center pawns were on e3 and d4, the only one who could win the ending was Black. By move 41 Black's king had broken through on the kingside, and the plan from here was very simple: attack the e3 pawn with the king on f2 or f3 and play ...Nf1+, driving White's king away from the pawn. There were two complications. First, Ponomariov had to do a delicate dance with the knight to get it out of its box on the queenside; second, he had to cope with the possibility of White's king abandoning the e-pawn to raid Black's queenside pawns. I don't know if it was a win from the very beginning, but I'm positive that by 53...Nc8 at the latest, Black is winning by force. Ponomariov has - you guessed it! - five points.

Standings After Round 8:

1-5. Ponomariov, Karjakin, Caruana, Leko, Naiditsch 5
6. Kramnik 4.5
7. Meier 4
8. Fridman 3
9. Bartel 2
10. Gustafsson 1.5

Last Round Pairings:

Karjakin - Gustafsson
Kramnik - Meier
Bartel - Caruana
Naiditsch - Leko
Ponomariov - Fridman

It's not looking good for a six-way tie, as I'd expect Karjakin and Ponomariov to have especially good winning chances, and Caruana has reasonable hopes for a win as well. Naiditsch-Leko smells drawish, while Kramnik will have a tough time beating the unbearably solid Meier (and will have to hope all the other games finish in draws).

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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