Older Chess Videos
There's an interesting collection of chess videos, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, here. Worth a browse.
HT: Ross Hytnen.
There's an interesting collection of chess videos, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, here. Worth a browse.
HT: Ross Hytnen.
Every so often I take a look at games submitted on ChessVideos.tv by the viewers, and this was just such a week. This time around, I examine three games, all unified around the theme of all-in attack. In each case White's position is collapsing on the queenside and about to collapse everywhere else, too. The games are all very exciting, and there are principles we can generalize from these games for both the attacker and the defender to keep in mind.
Have a look! The show is free (quick, free registration is required if you haven't done it already) and will be available on-demand for the next month or so.
The 10-game matches between Hikaru Nakamura and Ruslan Ponomariov and between Ben Finegold and Ray Robson finished tonight with each pair playing two rapid games apiece. In the first round of the day, Nakamura and Robson won with Black, and in the finale drew with White. (Just the way they drew it up, I'm sure.) The final tallies:
Nakamura 6.5 - Ponomariov 3.5
Robson 6 - Finegold 4
Much more info on the St. Louis Chess Club website.
It's here, with my annotations. Very impressive play by Boris Gelfand!
It was almost a must-win situation for Boris Gelfand, as Alexander Grischuk would have been a favorite had the match come down to rapid and possibly blitz games. Remarkably, Gelfand came through with a convincing victory, and by doing so he won not only the game but the match as well, and thereby qualifies for a title shot against Viswanathan Anand in 2012.
The first thing Gelfand did right was to avoid the English! Instead, the opening was a Fianchetto Gruenfeld, featuring a line that has become very popular over the past year or so. Grischuk had the first new idea, but Gelfand seemed to have a better feel for the particular middlegame that arose. Gelfand stood better, and when Grischuk chose not to play 23...f5 but allowed e4 and then d5, it was as good as over. White's forces rolled through Black's position, and it turned into a massacre.
So a big congratulations to the 42-year-old Boris Gelfand, who was responsible for two of the three classical wins (out of 30 games) in the event. He has shown once again that even if it's an exaggeration to say that life begins at 40, it certainly doesn't end at that age, either - as the "youthful" 41-year-old Anand knows as well.
Game (with notes) later.
While the classical portion of the Nakamura-Ponomariov and Finegold-Robson matches finished on Sunday, there were still four rapid games to be played. They got two in the books today, and then the last two will be played tomorrow. The results: Nakamura drew the first game with Black and won the second with White, giving him an overall match lead of 5-3. Finegold had the same results in the opposite order, winning with White (his first victory in the match) before drawing the second game. He thus closed Robson's lead to a single point, 4.5-3.5. (Event site here.)
In Danzhou, China, a very strong round-robin event just finished, won impressively by rising star Yu Yangyi with 7/9. Wang Yue and Bu Xiangzhi (a current and former 2700) finished tied for second 1.5 points back, while current Chinese #1 Wang Hao tied for 4th-5th with Zhou Jinchao another half a point back. Women's world champion Hou Yifan had a rough time of things, finishing last with just two points. (Event site here, TWIC's event page here.)
Marjan Šemrl of Slovenia has clinched first place in the 24th Correspondence World Championship, though it must be on tiebreaks, as Tansel Turgut (listed as Turkish on the event crosstable, but I think he has lived in the U.S. for many years now) is just a point behind and has one of the two hitherto unfinished games left.
HT: Chess Today
Here's game five of the Candidates' final, with my notes.
Who knew? That brings the totals to a whopping 27 draws in 29 games for the Candidates. Of course this is in part a function of the short matches and the rapid tiebreaks, but it's pretty depressing nevertheless, as the point of this exercise is to determine a challenger for the CLASSICAL World Championship, not the rapid title.
This general complaint doesn't really apply to today's draw, however. Grischuk came up with a new move for White in the QGD, pressed hard and had serious winning chances until a careless moment allowed the wily Gelfand to escape with a nice tactic. In fact, Gelfand had several neat tactical tricks the second half of the game that allowed him to escape with a hard-earned draw.
So tomorrow is the last classical game, and we'll see if Gelfand can finally break Grischuk in the 1.Nf3 c5 2.c4 Nc6 3.Nc3 e5 English, or if he tries a different approach altogether. It will also be interesting to see how much of a sense of desperation he feels, if any, about facing Grischuk in rapid or possibly blitz games. Recall that in their world championship match in 2010 Topalov took some crazy risks against Anand, arguably motivated by a similar fear of Anand's prowess at faster time controls, and lost the final classical game with White. Gelfand is far more risk-averse than Topalov, he might still feel some pressure to make something happen tomorrow. We'll see!
I'll have today's game (with notes) later on...stay tuned.
The chess legend Anatoly Karpov, world champion from 1975 to 1985 and FIDE champ (during the divided era) from 1993 to 1999 turns 60 today. If you don't know much about Karpov, take a look at Wikipedia's biography, some of his notable games on chessgames.com, and this nice profile piece on ChessBase.
I'd also like to mention a remarkable later result of Karpov's that goes unmentioned by Wikipedia and ChessBase, and that's his second-place finish in the Eurotel Trophy rapid event in Prague in 2002. All he did in this knockout event was to beat Short, Kramnik, Morozevich and Shirov before losing to Anand in the final. (Are you kidding me?) Among the other players in the event were Kasparov, Topalov, Gelfand, Grischuk, Svidler, Adams, Leko, Polgar, Bareev and Radjabov. Ho hum. I think most GMs who pulled off such a result might get the knockout bracket tattooed on their arm; for Karpov, then just shy of his 51st birthday and already semi-retired from serious play for several years, it doesn't even merit a mention in his chess biographies.