The Chess Mind

Round 2 looked an awful lot like round 1. Two games were drawn - quickly - while Jakovenko's game resulted in a fairly long and interesting White win. The big difference: Jakovenko had White this time, and so Naiditsch fell into last place. Carlsen, who drew with Leko, remains in first.

Round 2 Results:
Leko - Carlsen ½-½
Kramnik - Bacrot ½-½
Jakovenko - Naiditsch 1-0

Standings after Round 2:
1. Carlsen 1½
2-5. Leko, Kramnik, Bacrot, Jakovenko 1
6. Naiditsch ½

Tournament site here, games with my comments here.

There weren't any fireworks in round 1 of the Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting, but the one decisive game, Carlsen-Jakovenko, was very much worth watching. The other games - Leko-Kramnik and Naiditsch-Bacrot - were of primarily theoretical interest. Kramnik equalized very easily in a Catalan and the game was a (dead) draw in 24 moves, while Bacrot demonstrated Black's thematic drawing resources in a trendy line of the Marshall Gambit.

By contrast, the Carlsen-Jakovenko did not peter out into a routine draw. The players headed into the Berlin Wall variation, and although nothing new happened for the first 25 moves or so the ending that resulted after 30 moves was fascinating. At a glance, it didn't seem as if Black should have any problems, but within 10 moves Jakovenko - the world's #5 player and a fine technician - was completely lost. I've done my best to puzzle out what went wrong, and you can see my analysis of all three games here.

Despite W. C. Fields' trenchant commentary, chessplayers flock to Philadelphia each 4th of July weekend to play in the World Open. (Bill Goichberg thanks you.) Those interested in following this mega-swiss from afar can do so, here.

Remember that they're generally a month behind, but although the Live Top List is fun, the only list that ultimately counts is the one put out by FIDE four times a year. Here's the current top 10:

1. Topalov 2813
2. Anand 2788
3. Carlsen 2772
4. Aronian 2768
5. Jakovenko 2760
6. Kramnik 2759
7. Leko 2756
8. Radjabov 2756
9. Gelfand 2755
10. Morozevich 2751

More information here.

Few things in chess are more satisfying than winning a model game. The opening prep goes smoothly, one gains an advantage of some sort of another, and a series of fine moves leads to the inexorable conclusion: we win!

And then there's the other 90% of the time.

Sometimes the success story takes place before our very eyes, but usually something else happens. Maybe the game is settled by a blunder, ends in a draw, or - worse still - we lose. Alternatively, the result is satisfactory but the path is a wild one. First one side has the advantage, then the other side fights back, and at the end of the slugfest an unpredictable conclusion appears. When that happens, then although we may not have the deep satisfaction of winning a model game, the resulting feeling might be even better: the feeling of having experienced and survived an adventure.

It's just such a game we'll look at in our ChessBase show this week, played in the FIDE World Championship in San Luis 2005. Peter Svidler had White against then-champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov, and the game took an incredible course. Kasimdzhanov introduced a novelty, but Svidler reacted well and obtained an edge. The position was incredibly sharp though, and when he erred Kasimdzhanov found a brilliant resource that gave him a big advantage. Then he too erred...but these are the sorts of errors that are far easier to spot in analysis than over the board. Besides, without the errors along the way, we would have been deprived of a truly amazing conclusion.

What happened? Join us and see! The show is free, after all - just log on to the Playchess.com server at 9 p.m. ET tonight (Wednesday night; that's 3 a.m. CET Thursday morning), go to the Broadcast room and select Svidler-Kasimdzhanov in the Games list. Hope to see you there!

Here's the position, again:


Wotawa 1963; White to move and draw

Were you able to solve it? White cannot allow Black to queen, so he must take the pawn. But which way? To figure that out, we must first figure out what Black is up to. After all, Black is not exactly promoting anything on the kingside, while a 4-0 queenside majority is normally enough to force a queen (and then some). We then notice that White's king is rather constrained, and a move like ...f6+ or ...h6+ puts it on the edge of the board, awaiting a cruel fate.

The problem with ...f6+ is that after Kh5, it will be impossible to mate with ...g6. That's because White will have Kh6, and Black can't put his king on g7 while his pawn remains there. So now we can work out the threat: Black will play ...h6+, scoot his king to h7, and play ...g6#. Note: even a White queen, with the move after ...Kh7, will generally be powerless against this idea. In fact, there's only one promotion square for a new queen that will allow a white queen to cope with this possibility.

If you hadn't worked it out before the hints, those will probably get you most if not all of the way there. But if not, that's okay too. You can find the solution here.

Well, it's at least relatively easy. (But not trivially easy. Black has a threat!)


Wotawa 1963; White to move and draw.

The solution will be given tomorrow.

Rather than allowing the previous post to have comments, it seemed a better idea to reserve this post for that purpose. So have a look there to see the problem, and then offer your solutions here.

Visiting my friend Alex Herrera's correspondence chess website, I came across this position:


(His diagram and arrow.)

It's from the game Walters-Herrera, USCCC18, and of it Alex writes "Draw". Does this mean that the position is a draw (objectively) or that it wound up drawn, or both? Was 1.Kxf6 played, or should it be played, or is it White's threat but with Black to move? I have answers to some but not all of these questions, but for the sake of simplicity, let's set things up this way:

Suppose it's White to move. What should he do, and what's the right result? Work it out, but save your answers for a second post, so that those who come across this post later don't have the solution spoiled for them. I'll offer my thoughts later - if necessary. (If my talented and industrious readers work it out themselves, all that will be left for me is to say yea and amen.)

For those of you waiting for my announcements to check them out, you get a two-fer. Last week's show was posted after I had decided to take the week off from blogging, and now that I've resumed the new show is up as well. So:

(1) Last week's show: Part 6 on the Super-Fast Najdorf. This marks the end of the series (I can hear both the cheers and boos), and covers the variations starting with 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Be7 8.Qf3 Qc7 9.0-0-0 Nbd7 10.g4. This includes some of the sharpest chess known to mankind, and unless you're already thoroughly familiar with the B99 systems I highly recommend checking it out. Even if you never play them, you'll find the analysis most entertaining.

(2) This week's show: Viewer Questions, Episode 8. As usual with the viewer question shows, it's a bit of a grab bag, with some chess and some training advice. You might not find everything interesting, but since you'll probably find something you can use it's worth a look.

This is especially the case given that the shows are free (though you will need to register [also for free]) to watch, at least for the next month or so. (After that they go to the archives, where they can be accessed, along with the other two years' worth of my shows, with a premium membership.)

The Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting is one of the traditional super-events on the yearly calendar, and the one where ex-world champion Vladimir Kramnik has had some of his greatest tournament successes. He has won this tournament eight times since 1995, and he's in it this year as well. Here are the participants, together with their Live Top List ratings:

Magnus Carlsen 2772.4
Dmitry Jakovenko 2759.5
Vladimir Kramnik 2759
Peter Leko (the defending champion) 2755.9
Etienne Bacrot (qualified by winning Aeroflot) 2721
Arkadij Naiditsch 2700 (according to FIDE, but not the LTL - he will apparently drop below that when the new ratings come out on Wednesday)

It's a double-round robin running through the 12th of July, with a single rest day at the halfway point (July 7). Here are the round 1 pairings (thanks to Chessdom):

Leko - Kramnik
Carlsen - Jakovenko
Naiditsch - Bacrot

Predictions?

Easy go, easy come.

Vassily Ivanchuk's string of poor results in tournaments with a "classical" time control came to a convincing conclusion this past week when he won the King's Tournament in Bazna, Romania. Not only did he go undefeated (as did Boris Gelfand and Teimour Radjabov), he finished with an impressive 2874 TPR and his 7-3 score won the super-tournament by a full point. Alexei Shirov also bounced back from a (very) bad tournament by tying for third (at 5½, equal with Radjabov and half a point behind Gelfand), so the "old" guys aren't out of the picture yet by any means. (And that's a relief to those of us who aren't in our teens and twenties!)

Final Standings:

1. Ivanchuk 7
2. Gelfand 6
3-4. Radjabov, Shirov 5½
5-6. Kamsky, Nisipeanu 3

The next big event is Dortmund, which I'll cover more thoroughly in my next post.

Here.

The norm event wasn't an unmitigated disaster, but it wasn't exactly a smashing success, either. So while I'll do my best to learn the lessons of the tournament, I'm going to move on to other topics on the blog. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with their wishes, and we now resume normal blogging.

I'm preparing for another IM norm event, which starts tomorrow, so other than blurbing this week's ChessVideos show whenever they post it, there won't be much (any?) action here until the event ends Friday the 26th and I return to "civilian" life.

Wish me luck, feel free to send any killer novelties you've got stored up, and if you're feeling generous and want to help defray my expenses or my relative absence makes you overcome with gratitude for my blogging, please visit the donation site on the upper right. :) See you in a week or so!

In a couple of recent games at the Maia Chiburdanidze Cup, the talented young Slovenian IM Anna Muzychuk had a couple of textbook tactical finishes.


(Source: Wikipedia, Photo: Paweł Suwarski)

In the first, she was the victim:


Dzagnidze-Muzychuk, Maia Chiburdanidze Cup 2009, Round 6: White to move and win.

And in the second, she got to be the hero:


Muzychuk-Galojan, Maia Chiburdanidze Cup 2009, Round 8: White to move and win.

The solutions can be found here.

Robert Hübner*.

The quotation, once again, was this:

There are innumerable examples with this line [the Zaitsev Variation of the Ruy Lopez]; everyone knows the famous games from the world championship matches between Kasparov and Karpov.

It cannot be within the scope of these brief notes to discuss the merits of the main line in detail. The general statement must suffice that in introducing a sharp, clear-cut idea of counterplay (f7-f5 destroying white's centre) it seems to be more promising than the continuation chosen by...."

For those of you familiar with Hübner's work, you've probably got a pretty good idea of what's coming next. For those who aren't, you're probably wondering why I'd bother with such a pedestrian quote. OK, it's useful for someone unfamiliar with the Zaitsev Ruy to know that it featured in some extraordinary Kasparov-Karpov games and to know that ...f7-f5 is an important idea for Black in its main line, but really! - Is it worth bothering about that as a special quotation?

The answer is that it's not. My real interest in the quotation is the first sentence of the second paragraph: "It cannot be within the scope of these brief notes to discuss the merits of the main line in detail." Even less interesting, you might be saying to yourself. (Hold your horses, impatient reader.) The reason why this is amusing has to do with Hübner's work as an annotator, which is oh, shall we say, somewhat thorough. The book from which this quotation was found is called Twenty-five Annotated Games; and now here's a question: how long would you guess the book is? There are some authors who could finish the job in about 50-60 pages, and many more would reasonably call it a day at about 100-110 pages.

Not our Grandmaster Hübner - not by a long shot! Hübner, who was for a couple of decades among the world's strongest players (and no slouch now with a 2595 rating, despite a second career as a papyrologist, complete with Ph.D.), is legendary for his persistence in and enthusiasm for analysis, and the book comprises 416 pages. Nine of those pages are dedicated to material other than the games, and there are generally a couple of diagrams on every page. Even so, you're definitely getting your money's worth out of this volume.

Now let's turn to the game from which the notes were taken. That was game 22, Hübner-Portisch, from the first round of the 1981 super-tournament in Tilburg. The first 15 moves pass without comment, and then there are several short paragraphs, including the ones reproduced above. So far, "brief notes" looks plausible. As it turns out, though, Hübner devotes 52 pages to this game. The high point comes on White's 32nd move, when he spends 13 pages considering alternatives. Hübner was quite possibly pulling the reader's leg when he spoke of "brief notes", but if not I tremble to think what he'd consider a properly filled-out commentary!

Lest anyone think that the foregoing is intended dismissively, I assure you that it's not. His thoroughness is admirable (especially considering that the product was his, not Frybka's - the book was published in 1996), and while it's as obvious as almost anything in this world that very few will plow through the whole thing, the games are fascinating in their own right, and even skimming the analysis is valuable for instruction, insight, entertainment and training.

And fans of my ChessVideos presentations might benefit too: maybe I'll do a series called "The Super-Fast Hübner", where each part will cover a page of his analysis. Imagine the possibilities: we could get through the Hübner-Portisch game in just one year!

*Source: Wikipedia, Photo: Stefan64

One for the road:

Bazna: Good and/or exciting chess continues to be played at this super-tournament, and after the first cycle Boris Gelfand and Vassily Ivanchuk lead with 3½/5. In round 5, Gelfand defeated Alexei Shirov (who had been a co-leader) with the Black pieces in yet another great battle between these two elite grandmasters. Meanwhile, Ivanchuk made his way to the tie when he won - also with Black - after Kamsky needlessly "contributed" a rook to the Vassily Ivanchuk Rating Fund.

Ruy Lopez: With one round to go, Ivan Cheparinov enjoys a half-point lead over Mickey Adams. Happily for friends of dramatic finishes, they play in the last round, though given Adams' solid style and Cheparinov's getting the white pieces, it'll be hard to overturn the standings.

Capablanca Memorial: Leinier (or "Lenier", if you want to find his games in the databases) Dominguez has clinched clear first and finished his games, though everyone else (except Lazaro Bruzon) has a round remaining. I'm predicting draws...

Browsing a new games collection, I came across the following comment:

There are innumerable examples with this line [the Zaitsev Variation of the Ruy Lopez]; everyone knows the famous games from the world championship matches between Kasparov and Karpov.

It cannot be within the scope of these brief notes to discuss the merits of the main line in detail. The general statement must suffice that in introducing a sharp, clear-cut idea of counterplay (f7-f5 destroying white's centre) it seems to be more promising than the continuation chosen by...."

Who said it, and why is the comment noteworthy? I'll give the answer and explanation tomorrow. (Meanwhile, back to preparing for tonight's ChessBase show.)

More about it here. It airs in the U.S. at 9 p.m. ET, which means I'll have to miss (or record) it. The rest of you might certainly enjoy it though.

HT: Brian Karen

**UPDATE*

The times seem to vary from place to place, so check your local listings. Here, for instance, it starts at 8 p.m. ET; YMMV.