Gelfand Wins The Tal Memorial
On the eve of his 45th birthday, Boris Gelfand added another major success to his already packed resume by winning the extremely strong 2013 Tal Memorial. After six rounds he was in second place, half a point ahead of Magnus Carlsen (and others) and half a point behind Hikaru Nakamura. In round 7 he defeated Nakamura with Black, and as Carlsen only won one game in the last three round (in round 8, against...Nakamura) and none of the other pursuers made a serious run, Gelfand finished in clear first with 6/9. The man is having a great run, and his rating has achieved a career peak of 2773. Not bad for an "old" guy!
Magnus Carlsen finished in second with 5.5, and three players finished another half a point back. Shakriyar Mamedyarov was one of them, and he had some real winning chances against Carlsen in the last round. Had he won, he would have leapfrogged the Norwegian into second place. Fabiano Caruana is the second member of the trio, and he finishes the tournament on the verge of becoming the 7th player to break the 2800 barrier. (His rating will be 2796 when the next list comes out.) The third member of the triumvirate was a surprise, Dmitry Andreikin. Andreikin drew eight games and defeated Vladimir Kramnik when the ex-champ blundered his queenside away.
The remaining players all have cause for disappointment. Nakamura went from first to sixth by losing his last three games, the last to then-tailender Alexander Morozevich. Sergey Karjakin's -1 score wasn't a disaster but it wasn't cause for celebration either, especially after his recent triumph in Norway. Morozevich's score of 3.5 was leavened only by the last round win - his only win of the tournament - and by the fact that he finished even with world champion Viswanathan Anand, whose only win was against Morozevich. Finally, the tournament was an unmitigated disaster for Vladimir Kramnik, who finished winless at -3. I'm sure he'll rebound from London, but he hasn't yet.
Reader Comments (11)
Any Anand-Carlsen match bets? I'm guessing +2 for Carlsen.
Great job by Gelfand! It was an exciting fighting tournament, the final result never certain.
AIn't chess great? In which other sport can a veteran like Gelfand leave ambitious youngsters behind? I like his win over Nakamura very much.
Reaching your highest rating at the age of 45, after a lifetime of chess must be quite something! Kudos to Boris Abrahamovich.
How come there is no mention of Anand???
[DM: There was, but not a correct one. I noted that Morozevich tied for next-to-last with "world champion" [sic]. Initially I had written "the world champion", then eliminated "the" to add his name after giving the title, but apparently I got distracted before I finished the edit and his name was left off. It has been fixed.
I would like to know why Kramnik played so badly. It can't be declared only by his failure in London.
When an earlier person mentioned that Gelfand is 45, I couldn't help but check that.......and it turns out that he turns 45
TODAY ! Didn't know that !
[DM: Reread the first sentence of the post. :)]
I never figured out how to watch the live games via the tournament website, so I would just read the results. Later in the day I would watch the US Junior Championship with Yasser and Ben commenting. Now that it's over, I feel a void in my daytime viewing.
[DM: If you understand Russian and don't mind the lack of suspense generated by the results being known, you could go back and watch the broadcasts. They were and are on chesstv.com. Go there, and you'll find the bottom two rows give you instant access to rounds 9-4 (the top left video link is round 9, the bottom right one to round 4).]
...should be "explained", sorry
@Gerhard: interesting mistake. As I'm Dutch and "declared" means "verklaard", which also can mean "explained" I hadn't even noticed!
Strange -- even though Caruana is now 3rd on the live 2700+ list, I feel like I don't know him as a player at all. He hasn't made much of an impression. Granted, he's young enough, and his ascent has been rapid enough, that maybe he just hasn't had a chance to.