World Cup 2015 Round 2, Day 1: A (Mostly) Exciting Round
The first day of the second round of the 2015 World Cup featured some really terrific games; a good thing, too, as an early spate of short draws initially threatened to turn the day into a dud. Getting the draws out of the way, Sergei Zhigalko and Ilia Smirin drew with Veselin Topalov and Teimour Radjabov in 11 and 12 moves, respectively. If they had the black pieces that would be one thing, but it was very surprising to see them give away their white games against their elite opponents. But then I was even more surprised to see the higher-rated player give away draws with White as well. Hikaru Nakamura and Peter Svidler each drew in just 18 moves with White, against Sam Shankland and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, while Anish Giri split the point against Alexander Motylev in just 17 moves. There were five more games that were drawn in fewer than 30 moves, so boooooo.
But all told, that's still just 10 games out of 32, and 22 good games are more than enough to maintain the spectators' interest. Some highlights:
"U-S-A! U-S-A!": Nakamura and Shankland played to a quick draw, as noted above, but the other three Americans all won their games. Fabiano Caruana won with Black against Rauf Mamedov, Wesley So ground out a win - also with Black - against Csaba Balogh, and in a serious upset Alexander Onischuk defeated Sergey Karjakin, albeit with White. There's still at least one more game to be played, but for the moment chances look great for three and maybe four players for the United States to reach the third round, which may be their best ever performance in the World Cup and the knockout world championships. After decades of early exits by U.S. players not named "Gata Kamsky", I'm going to enjoy seeing the American players succeed.
Successful Favorites: Among the biggest stars not already mentioned, winners include Vladimir Kramnik (who managed to finally trick Lazaro Bruzon in the rook and bishop vs. rook ending), Ding Liren (who won with a nice kingside attack against Ernesto Inarkiev), Radoslaw Wojtaszek (who defeated Russian prodigy Vladislav Artemiev), Vassily Ivanchuk (who won with Black against Maxim Rodshtein), and Chinese super-prodigy Wei Yi beat Yuri Vovk.
Unsuccessful Favorites: Wang Hao was butchered by his countryman Shanglei Lu, David Navara lost to Azeri player Gadir Guseinov, and Mickey Adams lost to Viktor Laznicka.
In all, 15 of the 32 games had a winner, so while there will probably be some tepid draws tomorrow, at least 15 players will have to fight hard for their tournament lives.
Reader Comments (3)
Hi Dennis,
Will you be covering a game of the day, from each round. On your blog with an annotation from the chess world cup games.
[DM: I haven't done so for the first four days, so I wouldn't bet on it.]
I suspect that Zhigalko's draw offer could have been psychological - he may have expected Topalov to decline (just a few days ago, Danailov condemned lack of Sofia rules at the World Cup ...) and wanted to "force" him to play for a win with black. After today we know that this strategy didn't work out ... .
Of the other short draws, I would excuse Tomashevsky-Nguyen. True, only 23 moves were played, but the position was very sharp (both kings rather exposed) and both were low on time. Tomashevsky had 5 minutes (plus increment) left until move 40, Nguyen 14 minutes. "Anything could have happened" in mutual time trouble, the players didn't feel like rolling the dice given the stakes!?
Last round, when Giri pressed in a theoretically drawn endgame, you criticized him. Kramnik's game shows that there is nothing wrong with playing on in drawn positions and forcing the opponent to prove and earn the draw. Even very strong players make mistakes under pressure, and this is a competition between players, not tablebases. Had Kramnik followed your way of thinking, he would not have won the full point. (And by the way, for 35 moves Kramnik made no progress and his opponent clearly demonstrated that he knew the drawing idea. Was it unsportsmanlike to play it out? Of course not.). Frankly, in this and any other tournament, I much prefer a fight all the way to kings to the travesty of agreed short "draws." Shankland vs Nakamura has been especially ridiculous.
[DM: Your suggestion about "my way of thinking" seems to present a false dilemma: either to always play on in an objectively drawn position or never do so. First of all, it depends on what you can reasonably expect from your opponent; second, how you play for a win matters as well.
On the first point, not all objectively drawn positions are created equal. For starters - literally - the starting position is almost certainly objectively drawn, but it would be absurd to agree to a draw at the start of every game for that reason. More seriously, no one thinks that a player should agree to a draw in rook & bishop vs. rook against another human. Strong human players lose it with alarming regularity. But what about playing on against a computer that uses tablebases? Wouldn't that be a waste of time and energy at best? Of course it would be, because there's no chance of winning, barring a bug in the program or some sort of power failure.
Another example: would there be any sense in playing a drawn king and pawn vs. king ending for 60 moves, making pointless moves over and over until forced to push the pawn by the threat of a three-time repetition or the 50-move rule? Well, it depends. If I'm playing a fellow master, it would be pretty insulting if I did that. If a very weak club player somehow reached that ending against me, however, or if I had it in a bullet game and my opponent is down to his last few seconds, then I will play it out and give my opponent a chance to go wrong.
As for the second point, let's turn to Giri's ending. I didn't say that Giri was wrong to play it out - I would have done so myself, especially against a considerably lower-rated opponent. What I found unattractive was the way he played it out, dragging it out as long as possible while making a huge number of utterly meaningless moves, i.e. moves that posed no chess problems to his opponent. (Maybe something like 70-80 meaningless moves out of the 105 in that ending.) Giri wasn't giving his opponent a way to go wrong; he was just trying to wear him out and dull his vigilance. It's permitted and legitimate, and I recognize and accept that if the defender loses out of boredom it's his fault and not his opponent's. That it's permitted doesn't make it attractive or even particularly worthy of emulation, even if it works every once in a while. (There's also the danger that its practitioner will wear himself out and play worse in the next game, in which case it's quite reasonable to doubt the overall effectiveness of the strategy.)]