For a variety of reasons, last week's show was posted much later than usual. That was the bad news. The good news is that I decided to post not one but two shows: one covering an important and spectacular line in the Schliemann (aka Jaenisch) I had unintentionally neglected while covering that part of the Ruy, and the second is a pretty thorough (but not quite exhaustive) overview of the Exchange Ruy. The first video will be entertaining for all and useful to Schliemann players, especially as I offer a number of significant improvements over current theory. The latter, though less spectacular will be useful for players on both sides of the Exchange line.
As always, both videos can be seen for free (free registration required) and on-demand for the next month or so.
A couple of readers have mentioned a pair of American events, so while I hadn't intended to cover them I'll at least relent to the point of offering links.
So: on the west coast, in L.A., we have the Metropolitan International (top seeds Michael Adams and Loek van Wely); on the east coast, there's the Manhattan Open (the top seed, I think, is Jan Gustafsson). It isn't the World Cup (which starts in about a week), but for those needing a chess fix it's worth a look.
HTs to Daniel Parmet (for the first) and JT (for the second). JT also wants people to check out the schadenfreude special from round 6, Kacheishvili - Zhao.
A couple of posts ago, I linked to the Wikipedia page for former world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik (1911-1995); I'd also commend this article on the ChessBase news page as well, published a couple of days ago on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Botvinnik was a great player, but his broader contributions to the game make him an even greater figure in our game. He was the first really deep theoretician of the game, and he was also involved in training generations of top Soviet players, including Karpov, Kasparov, Shirov and Kramnik. (How's that for a collection of students?) His discussion of how to prepare for events has also proved influential, and he was even involved in the early days of chess programming, though in this case his successes were pretty limited. In all, though, he was a colossus of 20th century chess, especially in the Soviet Union, where he was known as the Patriarch.
After six of eleven rounds, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Andrei Istratescu lead with 4 points apiece, half a point ahead of three other players and a full point ahead of a group that includes Sebastien Feller. (Three points more than he deserves.)
(That's a senior event memorializing Mikhail Botvinnik, not an event for Mikhail Botvinnik, Senior.) Viktor the terrible - Viktor Korchnoi - is at it again. True, it was "only" a senior event, but still: he's the second oldest player there and he keeps winning. His score of 7/9 (TPR: 2637) put him a full point ahead of Evgeni Vasiukov (perhaps best known as the victim of Tal's hippopotamus-in-the-marsh piece sac, but a great player in his own right; have a look at what he did as an "old" man against van Wely in 2002 for a glimpse of what he was capable of in his heyday) and two points ahead of the still-active Lajos Portisch.
The star event memorializing Botvinnik will take place in a couple of weeks. There will be a rapid event starting September 1 with a few good players you've probably heard of: Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian and Vladimir Kramnik. They will subsequently play in team matches with some strong female players - less interesting, but it's always nice to the big guns in action. (More on this here.)
1. Russian Championship. Peter Svidler had clinched clear first with a round to go, and it's a good thing (for him), too, as like Vladimir Kramnik in Dortmund he finished the event in reverse. Alexander Morozevich crushed Svidler in the last round, finishing in clear second and continuing his climb back up the rating list. (In three events this rating period he has managed to gain 43 points and is now #17 in the world.)
Sergey Karjakin and Alexander Grischuk drew their games to finish tied for third at +1, and Kramnik also finished at +1 after beating Alexander Galkin in a most uncharacteristic game. Or at least, it was uncharacteristic of the Kramnik we've seen for most of the past decade. It's quite in keeping with his recent play. I'm not sure what happened to the old Kramnik, but this new version is a lot of fun to watch, and Alexei Shirov has nothing on this guy. Anyway, against Galkin, Kramnik offered a pretty implausible-looking sacrifice with 8...b6 9.c6 Bxb4; good enough for blitz, sure, but for a real game? Well, it worked!
2. World Junior Championship. What I feared yesterday has come to pass. (Feared not because I have any brief for or against either player, but because it seems unjust to me.) Darius Swiercz of Poland won his last round game, Robert Hovhannisyan of Armenia drew his, and Swiercz won the world junior title on tiebreaks. This, even though Hovhannisyan was tied or in front of Swiercz from round 5 on - and generally ahead of him. For three rounds, he was even a full point ahead of Swiercz, but it didn't matter. At any rate, it was a great event for both players, who finished with very impressive 10.5/13 scores.
In the race for third, it was good news for the home country (India) and more bad news for Armenia: Sahaj Grover defeated Samvel Ter-Sahakyan to take clear third with 9.5 points. In fourth, with the best tiebreaks of his score group, was American Ray Robson with 9. There was no bad luck in this for him, however, as a draw in the Grover vs. Ter-Sahakyan game would have left the latter in third on tiebreak.
1. FIDE Women's Grand Prix. This event finished earlier today, and Women's World Champion Hou Yifan finished first with 8/11. She drew comfortably with former women's champ Antoaneta Stefanova to clinch first, which she would have achieved in any case as neither of her closest pursuers managed to win their games. Kateryna Lahno finished in clear second with 7 points, and Anna Muzychuk and Tatiana Kosintseva tied for third with 6.5. The latter was the only remaining undefeated player going into the last round, but she had a poor last round game against Alisa Galliamova and lost with White.
2. Russian Championship. There's still a round to go, but Peter Svidler has clinched his 6th Russian Championship title. His win over Ian Nepomniachtchi gives him 5/6, a point and a half more than the troika of Alexander Grischuk, Sergey Karjakin and Alexander Morozevich. Morozevich had his fate in his own hands, and had he beaten Vladimir Kramnik today and Svidler in the last round he could have tied for first. Instead, he drew with Kramnik and will have to settle for a "moral victory" of sorts if he can pull off the win tomorrow.
3. World Junior Championship. Today's round, the penultimate one in this 13-round event, was the big moment for US chess fans as Ray Robson had fought his way up to a round 1 battle with the leader, Robert Hovhannisyan. It was a good fight, but Hovhannisyan triumphed in an interesting same-colored bishop ending. Hovhannisyan thus leads with 10/12, half a point ahead of Dariusz Swiercz and a a point and a half ahead of four others on 8.5. (Robson has 8 and is out of medal contention.) The crucial last round pairings look like this:
GM Vasif Durarbeyli (8.5) - GM Robert Hovhannisyan (10)
GM Dariusz Swiercz (9.5) - FM Vladislav Kovalev (8.5)
IM Sahaj Grover (8.5) - GM Samvel Ter-Sahakyan (8.5)
These pairings look very good for Swiercz, and at the moment his tiebreaks (as listed here) seem better than Hovhannisyan's, even though he has trailed the leader for most of the event. That seems unfair to me - in my view, in a long Swiss like this the first tiebreak should be head-to-head and the second should be cumulative score. It's not Hovhannisyan's fault that his opponents might have been slightly lower-rated players who outperformed their ratings, and he will have achieved what he did with black against Swiercz and an extra black in the tournament.
Speaking of lower-rated players who (initially) outperformed their ratings, Rombaldoni and Girish's joint fantasy-turned-nightmare continued. Both lost in round 12, making it four straight losses for Girish and .5-4.5 in the last five games for Rombaldoni. (Both have 7 points.) The psyche is an amazing realm.
Russian Championship. As it was after round 1, so it is again after round 5: Peter Svidler is again in clear first. Svidler defeated Artyom Timofeev with the black pieces, thanks largely, it seems, to Timofeev's time trouble. After 29 moves, Timofeev was at least equal, but then started sliding downhill from that point, falling completely off the cliff with his last move, 34.Ng4?? self-mating his queen.
Alexander Morozevich had been co-leading, but he not only failed to win this round, he lost a rook ending to Ian Nepomniachtchi that probably should have been drawn. (That doesn't mean it was trivial - obviously, since he lost it - but drawn nonetheless.) Remarkably, he's still in clear second, half a point ahead of Sergey Karjakin (who drew with Alexander Galkin) and fifth round opponents Vladimir Kramnik and Alexander Grischuk, who drew quickly by repetition.
With two rounds to go Svidler has 4/5, Morozevich 3, the trio mentioned in the final sentence of the preceding paragraph 2.5, Galkin 2 and Timofeev 1.
World Juniors. Robert Hovhannisyan has drawn his last two games, but that's still good enough to keep him in clear first. He has 9/11, half a point more than Samvel Ter-Sahakyan and Dariusz Swiercz and a point more than the four next closest pursuers, including Ray Robson. Two rounds remain. Remarkably, Koushik Girish has lost three in a row, while Axel Rombaldoni finally managed a draw after a three-game skid of his own. Both started fantastically, but then crumbled after their first loss, as if their ratings and non-GM titles mattered more than everything they had done up to that point. It reminds me of the following:
(The relevant gag starts at around :45 into the video.)
FIDE Women's Grand Prix. A few days ago some genius claimed that Hou Yifan was practically a "mortal lock" to win the event; after all, she was two points ahead of Tatiana Kosintseva with three rounds to go. Hou hasn't finished so strongly, losing her first game of the tournament (to Kateryna Lahno) and drawing today, but her 7.5/10 still has her a point ahead of Lahno and T. Kosintseva with a round to go. She'll even have White in the last round, against Antoaneta Stefanova (who is -1 for the event), so she should still be in good enough shape to finish in clear first.
FM Christoph Natsidis was given a two-year ban for cheating at this year's German Championship (the old smartphone in the bathroom trick, as Agent 86 might put it). A sad tale, but at least the 23-year-old law student(!) immediately came clean after getting caught - not that there was anything obvious he could do to dispute it!
This week's show should be useful on a number of levels. One benefit to viewers is that you get to see a small trap that's pretty easy for White to fall into, and in this particular blitz game, the fish - me - was hooked. That was the beginning of the story.
The next part was figuring out what to do then, and more generally, figuring out how to respond to an unpleasant surprise. If I reacted normally to my opponent's idea, he would have taken over the initiative. Sometimes that's just what you should do: be objective, and if the position calls for you to go on the defensive for the time being, then do so. It's a good idea to be sure that that's really necessary, though, and after spending more than a third of my time thinking about how to react, I found a really fascinating way to join the battle rather than going over to defense. It worked!
I think you'll find the game very entertaining (at least I hope so), and trying to work through some of the positions should make for a good training session as well. So please have a look: the show is free, as always (free registration is required), and it will be available on demand for the next month or so.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 1:10AM