Corsica Finals: Hou Yifan vs. Sergey Fedorchuk
Well, sports fans, Monday was a bad day for those of us who are hoping that Viswanathan Anand will win or at least be competitive against Magnus Carlsen in their coming world championship match. It would be wrong to draw too sweeping a conclusion from his ouster in the Corsica semi-finals at the hands of Sergey Fedorchuk, but it certainly doesn't lend itself to any optimistic scenarios either. Fedorchuk won the first rapid game with Black, and then drew from a position of strength with the white pieces - and he could easily have played for a win in that game too.
In the previous round Anand had blanked Pavel Tregubov 2-0 while Fedorchuk had struggled to overcome Csaba Balogh. They drew their rapid games, and the first blitz game was also drawn. Fedorchuk had White in the second blitz game but no advantage, but when Balogh went crazy with 17...Qh5? and 19...e5 he was quickly crushed.
In the other half of the draw, Hou Yifan made things as difficult for herself as possible before qualifying for the finals. As she did yesterday, she began her quarterfinal match with Martyn Kravtsiv by losing with the white pieces. As yesterday, she won the rematch and then won the blitz playoff 2-0. In the semi-final round she unexpectedly played Robert Ruck, who had defeated second seed Ivan Saric 1.5-.5, winning the second game with the pieces.
In the Hou-Ruck match Hou broke the pattern by winning the first game with White, but the overall pattern of needing to suffer continued intact. She lost the second game, and then lost the first blitz game to boot - both losses were with Black. She won the second blitz game, and then it was time for an Armageddon game. She had White and five minutes against Ruck's four minutes and draw odds, and she came through with a good win.
Tuesday will see the battle of the 2673s, and the silver lining for Anand is that he gets an additional day of preparation for the Carlsen match.
Reader Comments (3)
Games here :
https://arena.chessdom.com/tournaments/500?embed=580&ba=1#/stream_tournaments/show/500
I follow your blog very closely and agree with most of your views but I will have to disagree that somehow Anand losing a 15-min rapid game is any indication of his form vs Carlsen.
How about his unbeaten candidates or dominating Bilbao masters performance?
[DM: His play in the Candidates and Bilbao were a significant step up from his play in recent years. Both had their blotches though, and Bilbao in particular wasn't as impressive as you might think. He scored 3.5/4 against the low-2700s, Ponomariov and Vallejo, but in none of those games did he do anything special. Ponomariov was lost out of the opening while Vallejo self-destructed twice, most egregiously with White in what everyone (Anand included) said was basically a dead drawn position. Carlsen isn't going to play anything like that. And in his two games vs. Aronian he got nothing with White and drew the first game, while in the last round he lost the same way he did to Carlsen in games 5 and 6 of their match. He was slightly worse but really should have drawn, and then a little at a time, drip by drip and drop by drop, he lost without a fight.]
He lost a rather couldn't-be-any-less-important 15 min game. Nothing more, nothing less.
[DM: That's possible, and I hope you're right. But at the very least it doesn't give any grounds for optimism.]
Didn't Carlsen have a very poor ending to the candidates and barely squeezing through to the WCC and still manage to win?
[DM: Sure, but the last round was crazy because of the race with Kramnik - both players were forced to take dubious risks on account of what was going on in their rival's game - and that was long before the championship match. What happened in between? He finished ahead of Anand in Norway, in the Tal Memorial (where he obliterated him in their head-to-head classical game), won a rapid match with Predojevic and then won the Sinquefield Cup and hit a new rating record.
Anand has had some high points this year too, but has shown some signs of weakness as well - and unfortunately at least some of those weaknesses are of the sort Carlsen is best suited to exploit. But I want to be wrong, and to see Anand make a very good match out of it. And if he can win, that would be one of the all-time great stories in chess history!]