Informant 131: A Short Review
Another three months have gone by, so it's time for another edition of the Chess Informant. (See the long list of tags on the side for many more Informant reviews.) As regular readers of this blog are well aware by now, the Informant is a periodical that comes out quarterly, and has both an old-fashioned component and a newer component. The old-fashioned part is a hefty collection of well-analyzed games (200 is the number the publishers have settled on for the time being) annotated only without languageless symbols, and the newer part is a series of articles in English. There are also short sections dedicated to combinations, endings, and studies; and there's also a summary of tournament results from the previous quarter, along with a re-presentation of the best game and the best theoretical novelty from the preceding volume. All of this is standard, but as the studies section had been yanked from Informant 130 I'm pleased to see that it has been restored in this issue.
While the short sections and especially the 200 games are valuable, even critical parts of each issue, there is nothing requiring further elaboration about any of them. If you've seen a prior issue of the Informant, you'll know what you're getting from them in this issue as well. So let's summarize the articles in this issue:
There are 14 articles in all, each written by a grandmaster. And often especially impressive grandmasters at that, including six players currently in the top 100, three of whom are rated over 2700: Yu Yangyi (2750), Michael Adams (2736), and Bu Xiangzhi (2712). To specifics:
Sarunas Sulskis profiles Wesley So, the #2 player in the world and the hottest player in the chess world since last summer. Sulskis looks at a couple of So's games from Wijk aan Zee, along with three others played in 2016.
Farrukh Amonatov looks at one of the most important, though not one of the most interesting, events of the first part of the year: the Grand Prix tournament in Sharjah. The tournament finished in a three-way tie for first between Alexander Grischuk, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov. Amonatov looks at two wins from each of the winners, and an additional three games besides.
Up-and-coming Indian GM Baskaran Adhiban had a strong performance in the top group at Wijk aan Zee, and he takes a close look at his wild game with tournament winner So. The game was an exciting draw in a King's Gambit, and Adhiban was one of the few players in that event to enjoy winning chances against So.
Emilio Cordova - who was in the top 100 when he wrote his article - covers Vladislav Fedoseev's triumph in the Aeroflot Open (which enables him - Fedoseev - to play in Dortmund later this year). Fedoseev has a fresh style that isn't overly influenced by the computer, in Cordova's opinion, and in the games Cordova shows that judgment is vindicated.
Bu Xiangzhi presents five games from the Chinese League, a very strong competition that is somewhat underappreciated in the West. (In part, I think, because chess fans fail to notice league events in general, as they're less likely to receive live media coverage.)
Mykhaylo Oleksiyenko is also just shy of the world's top 100, and his article is on Hikaru Nakamura's ability to bounce back from defeat as seen in this past December's London Chess Classic. He shows a couple of Nakamura's losses in the event, before moving on to his impressive (though not quite perfect) win against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
Chinese super-GM Yu Yangyi's article is called "Strategies for Trapping the Enemy King", and he demonstrates his prowess as an attacker with a pair of his victories from the first part of the year: one from Gibraltar and one from the Aeroflot Open.
English super-GM Michael Adams was also a participant in Gibraltar, and he presents five games from that tournament, including especially three of his own.
More Gibraltar: Chinese GM Ju Wenjun was the top female player in Gibraltar, defeating Hou Yifan, among others, and becoming the fifth woman in chess history to surpass the 2600 mark. She presents her win - with Black - against Hou.
Last year's Olympiad has been over for some time now, but such a rich event is an almost inexhaustible source of high-quality material. Surya Ganguly takes a look at the game Caruana-Eljanov, which was a critical game from the match that wound up determining the winner. (That was the U.S. team, for those who might have forgotten, on nail-bitingly close tiebreaks over Ukraine.)
Eduardas Rozentalis also presents a single game in his column, taking a deep look at Andreikin's great win over Aronian from this year's Wijk aan Zee tournament.
Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant digs into some of the most interesting games from the women's section of last year's Olympiad, including Hou Yifan's startling loss to the Latvian Minister of Finance!
Aleksandar Colovic has a interesting and easy to apply article called "Opening Approaches in Doha" - Doha being the site of the rapid & blitz world championships late last year.
Finally, Paraguayan GM Axel Bachmann is an up-and-comer in his own right, under 30 years of age and breaking into the top 100. But there's young and then there's young. He lost a game last October to 11-year-old Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu in the final round of the Isle of Man tournament. He bounced back well, and shows three important victories from subsequent tournaments that he won.
This wasn't the most spectacular issue of the Informant, and it was a little surprising to have only one article on openings, and a relatively informal (though certainly interesting) one at that. Still, even an "ordinary" issue of the Informant is a worthwhile purchase for serious players. So if you're over 1900 and/or an ambitious player, I recommend purchasing a copy from your favorite outlet.
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