A Review of Cyrus Lakdawala's Kramnik: Move by Move

Cyrus Lakdawala, Kramnik: Move by Move (Everyman Chess, 2012). 416 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.

While IM Cyrus Lakdawala has been a prominent figure on the California chess scene for at least three decades, it's only in the last several years that he has turned his hand to writing chess books. He has been remarkably prolific in that time, cranking out no fewer than nine books. His latest (I think!) is Kramnik: Move by Move for Everyman Chess, one of seven "Move by Move" books he has written for that publisher. Most of them have been opening books, but along with the present work he has also written a "Move by Move" book on Capablanca.

Those familiar with Lakdawala's chess know that he likes technical positions. It's not that he can't play sharply - it would be hard to achieve the IM title without a reasonably high degree of proficiency in all aspects of the game - but his leanings are towards the technical side of the game. That makes him a reasonable choice to author a book on Vladimir Kramnik, the 14th World Chess Champion, though I think it should be noted that despite a stereotype that has arisen around Kramnik, he is a far sharper player than most amateurs seem to believe.

This is reflected in the book. Of the six chapters presenting Kramnik's games, two of them - "Accumulating Advantages" (chapter 5) and "Kramnik on Endings" (chapter 6) are just what you'd expect. But at least three of the other four chapters suggest a different Kramnik than the Berlin + Petroff stereotype would suggest: "Kramnik on the Attack" (chapter 1), "Riding the Dynamic Element" (chapter 3) and "Exploiting Imbalances" (chapter 4). (Chapter 2, "Kramnik on Defence", is harder to categorize based on the title alone.) Indeed, Lakdawala addresses the Kramnik stereotype early in the book and seeks to challenge it. He begins chapter 1 as follows:

I had the hardest time compiling this chapter ["Kramnik on the Attack"], mainly because the cup runneth over from a glut of incredible attacking games - way too many for one chapter, or even one book for that matter. So this chapter is one of the largest in the book, to give Kramnik his attacking due.

Kramnik is not a name which normally comes to mind as associated with the word attack [sic], the way Linda McCartney isn't often associated with her music career…. Kramnik creates so many of his attacks by camouflaging true intent. He switches suddenly from strategic build-up, only to cash out mysteriously into a promising attack. He normally earns his attacks the hard way, incrementally, and very rarely attempts a wild leapfrog over the opposing barrier, in Morozevich/Nakamura-style.

There are 10 games in that chapter, nine in the chapter on defense, 10 in the chapter on dynamic play, eight games on exploiting imbalances, 10 on accumulating advantages and 12 on endings. Added to the one game in the intro, there are 60 in all.

Lakdawala's notes are primarily aimed at middle to upper-middle level club players. The analysis is generally light, but there are typically several critical moments in each game where he'll dig in and get to the bottom of things. If the analysis is light, however, the same can't be said for the verbal commentary. Lakdawala shines when it comes to offering explanations, often doing so in dialogue. Here's an example from Short-Kramnik, London 2011, position after 12…Qe6-f5(!!)

A curving finger beckons White's bishop to e7.

Question: Something is not quite right, like the college student who texts his mom to wish her a happy Mother's Day, rather than take the effort to call. Did Kramnik just drop a full exchange?

Answer: To a very small child, money is just paper and nothing more. Kramnik sac'ed the exchange - he didn't drop it.

Question: For what compensation? His "sac" looks like one part bluster and nine parts bluff.

Answer: Strangely enough, Black gets compensation with the following:

1. White's disfigured, doubled f-pawns and isolated h-pawn.
2. When White takes the exchange on f8, his bishop has trouble returning, since Be7 is met by … f5-f6!, continuing to imprison it (a theme Short was unfortunately unable to evade later in the game!)
3. White's rooks just don't work well in the resulting position.

Conclusion: I think Black stands equal at a minimum after the acceptance.

13 Be7!?

The bishop, full of feral insinuation, cautiously approaches e7, though he knows something is wrong. It is too easy. But who could resist? Short gets ambitious and pounces, as his haughty bishop, annoyed by Black's refusal to show deference, decides upon punitive action against Black's f8-rook. Personally, I have grave doubts about the move. In fact, I think White is the one fighting for the draw. A more cowardly-inclined man like me would undoubtedly go for 13 Qxf5 Bxf5 14 Bd3, when the position really is boring and drawish.

This extended quotation reveals two more things about Lakdawala: his self-deprecating humor, which appears elsewhere in this book (and not only in this book), and his love of figures of speech. The book is rife with analogies and metaphors - many odd and amusing - and some will find it excessive. (The rest will find it unbelievably excessive!) It's okay: roll your eyes and groan when it gets to be too much, but he's never boring and it's hard not to be in a good mood while reading the book.

In fact - his sense of humor left me amused even as he took some shots at…me! You may remember Kramnik's match with Levon Aronian last year, and that in the one game he won Kramnik essayed the Scotch Four Knights: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.d4. The opening had the reputation for being both dull and highly drawish, and I was far from the only one who said so. So why did Lakdawala single me out? For two reasons, I suspect. First, it's easier to pick on me than the GMs who expressed similar sentiments. But the second was that I went out of my way to vent some spleen that day, referring to the Scotch Four Knights as "disgustingly dull" while offering as a motto for its advocates "Not everyone is brave enough to play the London System!" As Lakdawala has also recently written books on both the Four Knights and the London System, I could hardly have done more to make myself a target! It felt like Lakdawala repeated my "disgustingly dull" remark about 20 times, but fortunately he let me off the hook with "only" three repetitions after the initial quote. As noted above, though, it was always done in a wry manner, so I was laughing all the way.

One thing he gets wrong, though - understandably, as he probably seldom or never looked at my blog except to find the quote - was to infer from my dismay at Kramnik's choice of opening in that particular game to a lack of respect for Kramnik or that I find him a dull player. The longer someone reads this blog, the clearer it will be that I have tremendous respect for Kramnik; in fact, he's probably my favorite player among the contemporary elite.

In conclusion, Kramnik: Move by Move is an entertaining read aimed especially, but by no means only, at mid-to-upper-mid-range club players. Recommended.

Kramnik On His London Tournament

While he didn't win the 2012 London Chess Classic, Vladimir Kramnik had an excellent tournament, going +4, taking clear second and moving back into second on the rating list. In this video interview, he discusses his performance, Magnus Carlsen and his chances in the upcoming Candidates matches. Worth a few minutes of your time.

HT: monster_with_no_name

London Chess Classic, Round 2: Carlsen, Kramnik Win Again, Break Rating Barriers

Nothing is official until the tournament is over, but the unofficial news after round 2 of the 4th London Chess Classic deserves notice. With his win over Levon Aronian, Magnus Carlsen has (unofficially) pushed his rating to 2855.7, breaking Garry Kasparov's all-time rating record of 2851 and equalling (when rounded up) Kasparov's retroactively calculated unofficial peak of 2856. In the process of winning, he has also pushed his lead over Aronian to a whopping 51 points on the live rating list.

His partner in the lead is Vladimir Kramnik, who defeated Hikaru Nakamura with the black pieces. He too accomplished something noteworthy in pushing his rating back over 2800. He has also moved close to the number two spot on the rating list - the next extra half-point he gets relative to Aronian will do the trick.

Now for a brief recap of the games: Aronian sacrificed a pawn in the opening against Carlsen but seemed to misplay it, after which Carlsen, with White, had very good winning chances. Aronian dug in very well and at one point may have even been better, but when he failed to react properly to Carlsen's pawn advances on the kingside the tables turned again, and White won with a nice breakthrough combination in the end.

Against Nakamura's unusual Scotch with 6.Qe2, Kramnik seemed to come out of the opening in very good shape, and in due course won a pawn. It took a lot of work for him to convert the advantage in a queen ending, but he was up to the task and brought home the full point.

Viswanathan Anand had the white pieces against Luke McShane, but he was soon much worse. Only dogged defense and a bit of luck enabled him to escape.

Finally, Judit Polgar enjoyed a material advantage against Gawain Jones on the white side of a Sicilian Dragon, but Jones somehow managed to keep just enough counterplay to prevent Polgar from consolidating. After yet another long, hard fight, they too agreed to a draw.

Round 3 Pairings, with scores (3-1-0 system) in parenthesis:

• Aronian (0) - Anand (1)
• Kramnik (6) - Carlsen (6) (The Big Game!)
• Jones (1) - Nakamura (3)
• Adams (3) - Polgar (1)
• McShane - Bye (+ commentary)

Dortmund 2012, Round 2: Four Lead

Round 1 of the Dortmund Sparkassen may have been dull, but today's round was a lot of fun, with both fire and blood on board. When it was over, four players shared the lead: Vladimir Kramnik, Sergey Karjakin, Ruslan Ponomariov and round 1 winner Georg Meier.

The first game to finish was a beautiful massacre by Vladimir Kramnik, essaying the King's Indian(!!) against Jan Gustafsson. It was one elegant tactic after another, and after only 27 moves Gustafsson threw in the towel.

The next game to finish was a sort of "appendix" to round 1, a short, dull draw in an Open Catalan between Daniel Fridman and Peter Leko.

Sergey Karjakin, my pick to be "vice champion" to Kramnik, won with Black against Mateusz Bartel in a Petrosian Queen's Indian. White achieved a powerful-looking passed pawn on d6, but after the overoptimistic 18.Qxc4(?; 18.0-0 would have been safer and sufficient for equality) Karjakin's pieces worked around it on their way to White's king. Karjakin played very well (though not perfectly: the power shot 28...Rf5! was one of several possible improvements) and poor Bartel never managed to get his king to safety or his rook from h1 into the game, and was routed.

Ponomariov's game with Fabiano Caruana wound up with the "right" winner, but the "wrong" way. Ponomariov enjoyed a slight advantage for a long time with White in a Moscow Sicilian, but by this point his advantage had disappeared:

It's White (Ponomariov) to move; what should he do? He found a very nice tactical blow, but had Caruana reacted appropriately the position would have remained equal. Unfortunately, Caruana had only around one minute (plus the 30-second increments) to make his next ten moves after seeing 31.Qxc4!? on the board, and that wasn't enough time to find the right move - especially if he was surprised by this shot and needed to regain his psychological bearings. (My analysis of this portion of the game, along with Kramnik-Gustafsson, can be found here.)

Finally, Arkadij Naiditisch and Georg Meier drew their game after a long fight. A Hedgehog with a fianchettoed king's bishop turned sharp when White (Naiditsch) sacrificed his knight on d5. Eventually Meier returned the piece to break the pressure, and even had a slight but unconvertable edge in a rook ending.

After two rounds, Meier, Kramnik, Karjakin and Ponomariov share first with 1.5 points apiece. Leko, Naiditsch and Fridman have 1; Gustafsson and Caruana have half a point and Bartel has the same total we do.

Round 3 Pairings:

Leko - Gustafsson
Caruana - Fridman
Meier - Ponomariov
Karjakin - Naiditisch
Kramnik - Bartel

Happy Birthday, Vladimir Kramnik!

Gelfand's birthday was yesterday and Kramnik's is today, and only one of them at most will get what he really wants between now and his next birthday. (It's about 10 months until the next Candidates' event.)

Surprise, Surprise: Game 12 A Short Draw; Anand-Gelfand Go To Tiebreaks On Wednesday

It's not the first world championship match to finish (or at least finish the "classical" portion) in a draw. This already happened in Lasker-Schlechter (1910), Botvinnik-Bronstein (1951), Botvinnik-Smyslov (1954), Kasparov-Karpov (1987), Karpov-Anand (1997; though I won't object to those who don't want to call that a real world championship), Kramnik-Leko (2004) and Kramnik-Topalov + Danailov + FIDE arbiters (2006). And now, it has happened for an eighth time.

The game got off to a promising start for spectators hoping for blood, or at least a full-blooded battle. In game 10 Boris Gelfand had refuted, practically speaking, the line 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 e6 4.Bxc6 bxc6 5.b3 with the great idea 5...e5! If White doesn't take, Black gets a beautiful center and kills White's remaining bishop, while if White does take - as happened in the game - Black regains the pawn starting with 6...Qe7, and is doing well there too.

So Viswanathan Anand made a nice adjustment in this game. He started with 5.d3, and after 5...Ne7 now played 6.b3. Here 6...e5 simply loses a pawn for nothing, so Gelfand needed another plan. This time, he didn't have one prepared at home, and he started burning time prodigiously: 16 minutes on 6...d6, and then after 7.e5 Ng6 he had to deal with another interesting idea that was part of the champion's preparation: the pawn sacrifice 8.h4. Gelfand took the pawn: 8...Nxe5 9.Nxe5 dxe5, and then Anand played 10.Nd2 to stop ...c4.

Here Gelfand thought for a long time - around 35-40 minutes - and uncorked 10...c4 all the same! Rather than suffer a pawn up with a weak queenside and bad bishops, he sacrificed two pawns (leaving him one down) to fix his structure, gain a nice center and activate both bishops. Soon it was Anand who needed to be concerned about keeping things under control.

Unfortunately for Gelfand, and typically for both players in this match, it seemed that once they had done their "duty" with the black pieces and proved equality, it was then time to call it a day. Gelfand didn't try to press his potential initiative and may have even gotten a touch careless at the end when he played 20...a5 rather than 20...Rhc8. Now although the position remained a very likely draw, White could at least play on without any worries. Instead, after 20...a5 Anand played 21.Bc5 Rhd8 22.Bxe7 and offered a draw, which, needless to say, was immediately accepted.

That the position should be a draw is very likely, and the computers concur that White's advantage - if it exists - is minimal. But as White could play without the slightest risk, and enjoyed a big time advantage (56 minutes to 16, the latter number being the more significant one) it would seem the natural thing to continue. Vladimir Kramnik, who was commenting on the official site, found this "unexplainable", except to say that Anand couldn't handle the tension of the last game. He added that this was "one of the strangest decisions" he ever saw in a world championship match, confessing that he was "shocked": "I don't understand anything....It's a complete present for Boris."

Hyperbole or not, the game and the regular portion of the match have been drawn, and so on Wednesday we'll move on to rapid (and faster) tiebreaks. Here's what will happen, starting - unfortunately - at 12 local time in Moscow/9:00 in the morning CET/4 a.m. Eastern Time in the U.S. and Canada.

1st try: Best of four rapid games (25' + 10").

2nd try: Best of two blitz games (5' + 3"); if it's tied after two games this procedure will be repeated up to four more times. (In other words, a maximum of 10 blitz games/5 blitz mini-matches.)

3rd and final try: Armageddon: White gets 5 minutes and Black 4, with no increment until move 61 when the players will get an additional 3 seconds per move. White must win, otherwise Black wins the match.

Here, it must be said, the previous head-to-head stats paint a grim picture for the challenger. In previous rapid games (which probably includes the blindfold games from the Amber events) Anand has a big plus: +8 -1 =19, and in blitz the champ enjoys a +3 =4 record against Gelfand. Still, Gelfand's preparation has been excellent, so it's not inconceivable that he could hold his games with Black in rapid chess and pull a single rabbit out of his hat with White. We shall see!

One thing we can expect (I hope!) is an absence of short draws. Seven of the 12 games were drawn in fewer than 30 moves, five in fewer than 26 moves. It's not that the games have lacked content, but all the same, the players are giving each other too much credit, assuming that after they've leapt the initial set of hurdles they'll finish the game just as strongly. In rapid chess, that "courtesy" is likely to be thrown out the window, and good riddance!

(Subscribers: As usual, I hope and expect to have the materials ready for you tonight. But pity me come Wednesday! Non-subscribers can still sign up and get all the earlier work.)

Kramnik on the Berlin, vs. Aronian

You can find a short video here with Vladimir Kramnik discussing the Berlin Defense in the context of his match with Levon Aronian. One especially insightful remark notes that just because someone (e.g. Aronian) plays an opening successfully with one side doesn't necessitate being adept at that same opening (e.g. the Berlin) from the other side of the board. With some openings it's probably not so difficult, but with others, like the Berlin, he's probably spot on. I played a few Berlins with Black and felt pretty comfortable there, but it didn't translate into much when I played White. Conversely (and at a much, much higher level) I recall that for all the time Garry Kasparov put into meeting the Berlin with White, he was beaten badly when trotting it out against Judit Polgar. Considering both her generally less than sterling opening preparation (compared to Kasparov) and Kasparov's colossal plus score against her in their other head-to-head games (an otherwise undefeated 14-2 in his favor), Kramnik's comment is worth thinking about. Maybe we assume we'll know what to do when confronted with our own favorite openings, but this assumption might be misguided.

Aronian-Kramnik Match: Game 6 and the Match Drawn

The finale of the Aronian-Kramnik match was an exciting draw that was generally in balance until, where both sides had some chances (especially perhaps Kramnik). Levon Aronian stuck to his great 1.e4 experiment, and Vladimir Kramnik stuck to his trusty Berlin Defense. Rather than banging his head against the Wall endgame a third time, though, Aronian switched to 4.d3. For a while it was a calm maneuvering struggle, but not for long. Kramnik's plan for ...d5 started making things interesting, and then Aronian's 19.a5 sharpened the game further.

A complicated and roughly balanced endgame ensued shortly thereafter, but after Aronian's 30.c4?! Rd3 31.b4? Rxe3! he was suddenly in trouble. He drew with some work after 32.Rxe3 cxb4 33.Rg3 e3, but had Kramnik chosen instead 33...Ne7! 34.Rxb4 Bc7! White would have been in huge trouble.

After missing his one chance, Aronian was able to save the position, and so the game finished peacefully, as did the match as a whole. A good show for the spectators, and hopefully the players got most of what they hoped for as well, too.

The game, with my comments, can be replayed here.

Aronian-Kramnik Match: Game 5 Drawn

Vladimir Kramnik didn't get a lot with the white pieces, and it seemed that an early draw and a rapid game was in the spectators' future. He kept pressing, however, and the game grew increasingly interesting - though still ultimately even. So, after an (ultimately) entertaining draw, the match is now tied at 2.5-2.5 with one game remaining. (Note: that game starts two hours earlier, at 1300 local time in Zurich/7 a.m. ET.)

Match site here; the game, with my comments, is here.

Aronian-Kramnik Match: Game 4 A Quick Draw; Aronian Wins the Rapid Game

Perhaps still smarting from yesterday's defeat, Levon Aronian didn't undertake too much against Vladimir Kramnik's Berlin Defense and the game was drawn fairly quickly and comfortably by Black. That leaves the match tied 2-2, and after the rest day tomorrow they'll finish with games on Friday and Saturday.

The players decided before the match that in case of a draw lasting fewer than three hours they'd play a rapid game with colors reversed, and so they did. The game was for purely exhibition purposes, having no relevance to the match score or prize fund or anything else, so they could have some fun - and they did. Kramnik played 1.e4 and went on a bit of an attacking spree; unfortunately for him and the spectacle, he failed to follow up with the right move at the critical point. (The move in question is 25.Ne5, which he saw, as they immediately started analyzing it after the game, but rejected for some reason.) Aronian went on to win the entertaining game with a nice finish.

Here are both games, with my comments.