Monday, October 26, 2015 at 2:01AM It's a small event, with only four players involved, but a very prestigious one. The Bilbao Final Masters is a double-round robin featuring Viswanathan, Anish Giri, Ding Liren and Wesley So. Play starts at 4 p.m. local time (= 11 a.m. ET) each day, with a rest day on Thursday in between the first and second cycle. The first round pairings are So vs. Ding and Anand vs. Giri.
Monday, October 5, 2015 at 12:31AM According to Chess24's report on game 4 of the Svidler-Karjakin match at the World Cup, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov said that the 2016 World Championship match will definitely be in the United States, either in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, while the odds on next year's Candidates' tournament being here in the U.S. are about 50%.
Sounds good to me, especially if Hikaru Nakamura or Fabiano Caruana get a world championship match in New York, where they both used to live.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 11:05PM This was apparently announced today during the live broadcast of the U.S. Junior Championship: Wesley So will get the wildcard spot for the St. Louis leg of the Grand Chess Tour, the Sinquefield Cup. That tournament starts August 21, and the other nine players are Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Veselin Topalov, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk, Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015 at 7:47PM The "appetizer" for the Norway Chess tournament has concluded, and did so most satisfactorily for Wesley So. As in the first pair of games of his match with David Navara, so too in the second: he drew (reasonably) comfortably with Black before winning with White. So seemed to be in good form, and is now up to #8 in the world.
Sunday, June 14, 2015 at 9:02PM So far, the match between Wesley So and David Navara is not looking good for the home player (Navara). In game 1 he had to eke out a draw with the white pieces, and today with Black he was suffering throughout on his way to a loss. Around move 40 they reached a rook ending where So had good winning chances, but it wasn't clear whether it would merit a full point.
The critical moment came on move 46. So had a choice between 46.Rb6, aiming to grab as many pawns as possible as quickly as possible, and 46.Ke4, intending to activate the king. After 46.Rb6 Rh1 47.Rxf6+ Kh5 48.Rxa6 Re3+ 49.Kf2 Rxd3 I believe Black's counterplay is enough. Either White will deal with Black's center pawns in such a way that he loses his queenside passers, or he lets them go and gives Black a lot of counterplay - possibly too much. Either way Black should hold, as the swap of both sets of passers results in a drawn ending - probably even without Black's h-pawn.
So (therefore) chose 46.Ke4, and now Navara had to play 46...Rh1, so that by taking on h4 his king could protect the f-pawn from g5. The position is drawn after this, and if White goes all out for Black's f-pawn he can even lose: 47.Kd5 Rxh4 48.Ke6 Kg6 49.Rg7+?! Kf4 50.Kxf6? Rh6+ 51.Ke7 Kxf5 may well be winning for Black. Perhaps Navara missed this last point with 50...Rh6+, or had faith in his counterplay with 46...Re1+. If the latter, his faith was misplaced, and So went on to win pretty quickly and easily - though Navara did get in a little joke with his last move (a cute if simple stalemate trap).
Monday, April 20, 2015 at 10:07PM Who is this guy? Except for his hiccup earlier this month, Wesley So has been on an absolute tear going back to last year. With his third win in Shamkir, an impressive victory over Rauf Mamedov, So has taken over clear first in the tournament with 3.5/4, has scored 5.5 points from his last six games dating back to the end of the U.S. Championship, and has managed to recoup all of the points he had lost in the aforementioned tournament. If he keeps this up, he will be 2800 soon - possibly even before the end of the tournament.
But let's not get too far ahead of events in the real world. While he is in great form and defeated Mamedov in impressive style today, he still has to play Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand and Fabiano Caruana (among others) before he gets out of this tournament alive with his laurels. For now, though, he is half a point clear of Carlsen, who had pressure against Michael Adams but not enough to win. That game was drawn, as were all the other games not involving So. Vladimir Kramnik had white against Viswanathan Anand and thought he was pressing, but apparently unbeknownst to him he was following a correspondence game all the way to the point where the game was a dead draw.
Further back in the pack, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave drew with Caruana; the main excitement there was seeing someone resurrect Nadanian's interesting anti-Gruenfeld line with 5.Na4. Caruana wound up with an edge after the opening, but very quickly it became apparent that the only task was to reach move 40 or to engineer a repetition to satisfy the arbiters and the Sofia Rules. Finally, Anish Giri enjoyed a more serious edge at several moments in his game with Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, but that too petered out to a draw at the end of the first time control.
The games, with my notes to two of them, are here. The players have one more round before the rest day, and here are the pairings:
Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 6:32PM Remember those days last year when Fabiano Caruana was thought to be a contender on a par for co-world #1 status along with Magnus Carlsen? Those days are long gone, and are getting buried ever-deeper by the sands of time. Today a fresh dune covered the memories of last year's Sinquefield Cup as Carlsen beat Caruana for the second time this year, again with Black, and stretched his rating lead over his rival to more than 73 points. It was one of those strange wins, of the sort that led Viktor Korchnoi to claim back in 2011 that Carlsen's results were due to the latter's "hypnotic abilities". Caruana's on-again, off-again mini-edge had disappeared and the game was headed for a routine draw, but then American chess's prodigal son made a series of inaccuracies and soon lost. It was a remarkable collapse by the world's (now former) #2 player, and in the press conference he expressed understandable disgust with his play in the endgame.
Wesley So, like Magnus Carlsen, did a fine job of burying the past and its memories behind him. Since his poor stretch in the middle of the U.S. Championship, culminating in his forfeit loss, So has scored 4.5 points in his last five games, with only Vladimir Kramnik getting a draw (with white). Today So won against Michael Adams, who was holding his own in a complicated battle until he played 26...Qa5?, missing 27.Bh4. That got him into a bit of trouble, but he was coming out of the mess until his 32nd and especially 33rd move. His 36th move was a final major error, and So finished effectively.
The remaining three games were drawn, two of them especially forgettably. The game between Viswanathan Anand and Anish Giri was another matter, and Anand had excellent winning chances after his exchange sac on moves 17-18. (Move 17 committed him to it, but it was only "official" on move 18.) Giri defended well, but with best play Anand probably would have won. That makes two missed opportunities for the ex-champ, who trails the leaders by a point.
The tournament site is here, the games (with my notes) are here, and the round 4 pairings are as follows:
Friday, April 17, 2015 at 11:20PM The Gashimov Memorial in Shamkir got off to an exciting start with two victories in five games and two other games that very nearly had a winner. The first decisive game was Wesley So's crushing win over Anish Giri. So quickly dragged Giri out of theory, and as great as he is Giri looked like the proverbial fish out of water. I was reminded of a game I played against Anna Sharevich in 2014, where shortly after the opening ended I managed to do just about everything wrong. There was a famous model game in the opening line we played that I knew very well and had taught various students and shown in videos, and yet I was allowing my opponent to execute practically every idea from that earlier game. Fortunately, my play improved at a certain point and I scraped out a draw, but the first part of the game was almost a horror as I watched myself walk into every kind of trouble. I imagine Giri felt something like that, and in his case he wasn't given a chance to climb off the canvas.
The second won game also featured surprisingly soft defense by the conquered player. Vladimir Kramnik enjoyed some pull with White in a Catalan against Michael Adams, and through move 23 that's all it was. A slip on that move (23...Rab8 instead of 23...Rdb8, allowing 24.Rfd1!) made Kramnik's advantage a serious one, and then further errors on moves 28 and 30 put the game out of reach.
Those games would have been minor stories, however, had Viswanathan Anand managed to convert a winning advantage against Magnus Carlsen. Somewhat shockingly, Carlsen played the Marshall Gambit against Anand, entering the sort of theoretical discussion where Anand typically shines and which Carlsen tends to avoid. Anand played well and had an edge, but the big moment occurred when Carlsen blundered with 19...Qd7? After 20.Nd5! Carlsen was fortunate not to lose on the spot, yet even the resulting pawn-down endgame should have been losing for him in the long run. For a while Anand showed excellent technique, and was well on the way to the win. Unfortunately for him, he missed a possible winner on move 43 and definitely miscalculated on move 47, either missing 49...g5! or 51...Kh7, after which the game finished in a draw.
Shakhriyar Mamedyarov pushed hard against Fabiano Caruana and may have been close to a win. In the end, after 90 long moves, the players called it a day.
Finally, Rauf Mamedov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave also drew, and for the only time in the round no one was close to a win. Mamedov had an edge throughout, and thanks to MVL's good defense that's all he ever got, and the players agreed to a draw right after making the time control on move 40.
The games, with my (light) comments are here; round 2 pairings follow:
Sunday, April 12, 2015 at 10:40PM First, a rather disturbing interview with Wesley So's mother; second, a more general (regarding So) and wide-ranging article detailing another odd recent forfeit and a case of cheating.
Whatever is going on in So's life isn't our business and should be handled by him with his friends, loved ones and confidants outside of the public eye. I wish him all wisdom as he works through this personal crisis, and will now leave this topic behind.
Wesley So Saturday, April 11, 2015 at 1:02AM I've been playing in and observing chess events of all sorts and levels for 35 years, and have read about dozens, probably even hundreds of other matches and tournaments from the present going back more than 100 years before my birth. In all that time and in all my experience, both firsthand and secondhand, I've never heard of anything like what happened in round 9 of the U.S. Championship.
What happened? Wesley So was forfeited after just six moves of his game against Varuzhan Akobian for writing notes to himself on a separate piece of paper under his scoresheet. That this is forbidden is known to the overwhelming majority of amateur players; it's almost inconceivable that a professional wouldn't know this - especially a player (who was) in the world's top ten. Stranger yet, So had already been warned twice about this earlier in the tournament by Chief Arbiter Tony Rich, and his doing it a third time led to his forfeiting the game. Apparently he was only jotting down words of self-encouragement and advice, e.g. to double-check his variations, but it's against the rules of chess all the same.
So was not born in the U.S. and presumably isn't a native English speaker, but his grasp of the language is more than sufficient to understand the arbiter's earlier warnings. Clearly there's more to the story, and it is alleged in this article (HT: Allen Becker) that So has been suffering psychological pressure from his family and perhaps from Webster University's Paul Truong as well. Let's hope for his sake as a human being first and as a chess player second that he can work through those problems and find stability in his personal life. As for the rest of the championship, hopefully he can get through it without any further incidents and get his world back in order.
As for the chess, Hikaru Nakamura maintained his half-point lead over Ray Robson leading into their head-to-head matchup on Saturday. Nakamura was surprised when Timur Gareev met 1.Nf3 with 1...b6, but despite having played Owen's Defense hundreds of times in blitz on the black side he didn't handle it very well with the white pieces. Nakamura was worse, and was a bit fortunate that Gareev grabbed a second pawn and allowed Nakamura to force a draw by repetition. Robson also drew, with Black in a Scheveningen Sicilian against Sam Sevian. In fact, all the players anywhere near the lead (except for So) drew their games; the only win involving chess moves occurred in the game Daniel Naroditsky vs. Conrad Holt. Naroditsky played very well, and won his first game of the event.
In the women's section, Irina Krush has caught up to Katerina Nemcova with two rounds to go; they'll play in the last round. Krush had some enduring pressure against Tatev Abrahamyan, but the game was headed for a draw until Abrahamyan played 34...b3?, which lost. (Instead 34...Qc1, both allowing the queen to defend and to give some annoying checks, or 34...h6 to give Black's king a flight square, would have kept full equality.) Krush found a very nice and precise series of moves to win, including the easily missed 38.Qe5+. Meanwhile, Nemcova was better for much of her game with Viktorija Ni, but it never reached decisive proportions and the game was eventually drawn. Paikidze is a point back after beating Yu, and plays Nemcova in round 10. Nemcova will have White, while Krush will have Black against Yu. In the last round Krush has the white pieces vs. Nemcova, so since Krush is a huge favorite against Yu in round 10 Nemcova will have to push very hard for a win against Paikidze to maintain a reasonable chance of winning the tournament.