The Chess Mind

Though we’re missing Halloween (also Reformation Day!) by a day, it’s still close enough for us to enjoy our fourth Halloween show – we can now label it a tradition. Normally we celebrate the best in chess, but not now. Turning things upside down, we celebrate – or at least take a perverse pleasure – in the worst of chess, especially when it’s the world’s best who are the victims.

This week, it will be a special world champions edition; believe it or not, there are an awful lot of games to choose from. Think you messed up last week at the club? You’ve got nothing on these guys. We’ll watch Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Anand all take their pratfalls, and often in the worst possible situations, too. Are these games instructive? Probably not. But it’s hard to beat this collection for entertainment, and as a reminder that for all their very real greatness at the chess board, they’re human too.

So join me this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET, and BYOS (Bring Your Own Schadenfreude). (Directions for watching live shows - free - can be found here.)

One of the best and most enjoyable ways to work on one's tactics is by solving endgame studies, for at least three reasons. First and most obviously, we're using our mental muscles. Second, it helps develop our fantasy - our imagination. Sometimes tactics work in a stock way, as if taken from the pages of our basic exercise books, but not usually. (After all, our opponents know those books, too.) Third, it gets us into the habit of looking for our opponent's resources, as just about every study worth its salt will have at least one misleading try.

With this encouragement, have a look at this position:


Wotawa 1960; White to move and win

The solution will be given in a few days. A reminder: please don't comment proposed solutions. (I've blocked them from this post, but please don't leave them somewhere else.)

October has been a very good month for Hikaru Nakamura, who has won his second tournament in as many weeks. As noted in this post, Nakamura reached the semi-finals of the Corsica Masters; today, he finished the job. In one semi-final of this knockout event, Nakamura defeated recent Candidate Evgeny Bareev 3-1, while Rustam Kazimdzhanov eliminated former champion Anatoly Karpov by the same 3-1 margin. Kasimdzhanov is a great rapid player - I've speculated in the past that he might be the second strongest rapid player in the world, now that Kasparov has retired (behind Anand) - but at least today Nakamura was the better player, winning 2-0.

Congratulations to Nakamura, who will hopefully play in Mainz next year - it would be nice to see if he can qualify for a rapid match against Anand.

This week's show, demonstrating one of my games against a player some of you will remember from this blog's fairly recent history, helps remind us that attacking has its subtler side. Flinging pieces in the general direction of the opponent's king is generally part of the story, are as sacrifices and combinations, but sometimes a moment of prophylaxis is more valuable than a series of aggressive-looking moves.

See for yourselves.

In the brand new issue of ChessBase Magazine (#120 - a great product to which you should all subscribe*), Alexei Shirov gives a video presentation of his game with Viktor Korchnoi from the Carlsbad tournament played this past September. Shirov won the game, which was a good, hard fight, and then he said this about the post-mortem:

He was extremely polite and immediately started discussing the game. So then we went to analyze. We analyzed it for two hours, and I remember that [at] the end of our post mortem analysis I felt totally exhausted but Viktor Lvovich was...getting more and more energy. I remember [at] the end of the analysis I could see almost nothing, while Korchnoi was just winning in all the tactics and analysis, so basically taking his revenge for the game.

And the more incredible thing happened then. We finished our analysis finally, and we were invited...by the oldest grandmaster on earth, Andres Lilienthal, who was invited to the tournament as [a] special guest. So him and his wife, and also Viktor Korchnoi's wife, invited us to stop our post mortem and just join them for a glass of champagne. So what do you think? We took a glass of champagne, and what did Viktor Lvovich do? Of course, he continued discussing the game blindfold. So, really amazing love of chess, and I just hope that Viktor Lvovich will keep giving all of us the best example of love of chess and fighting spirit.

* Yes, I'm a ChessBase shill. However, I subscribed to CBM for years even before my ChessBase shows were a gleam in anyone's eye, and the product wasn't anywhere near as good then as it is now. Also, let me retract the statement slightly: if you're a beginner, you can learn from the material in CBM, but it's not the most useful product for you at this point. Your first jobs are to work on tactics and endgames, to play and learn from your mistakes.

Average club players and up (with some emphasis on "up") will find this product useful, instructive and entertaining. It's not a need, of course - no one needs chess, let alone chess books or software - but for serious players it's a very good value for the money. (In this issue, for instance, there are 12 theoretical surveys [almost all by grandmasters] and a further section with a couple of opening traps, sections on endgames and tactics, a solitaire chess column, hours of analysis videos, a database with 2500 recent correspondence games, and databases covering a total of 853 recent tournament games, 118 of them with annotations - including deep annotations for all 56 games from Mexico City. There are other bells and whistles, but this covers the best material on the disk.)

Advertisement over.

The Corsica Masters is a very strong, two-stage rapid event. The first stage was a 10-round, 95-player Swiss event. This was won by Hikaru Nakamura with 8/10; he and 13 others qualified for the knockout stage, where they were joined by the pre-seeded former world champion Anatoly Karpov and former FIDE champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

Two knockout rounds have been completed so far, with these results:

1/8 finals:
V. Milov - Cvitan 2-0
Guliyev - Landa 1.5-.5
van Wely - Prie 1.5-.5
Nakamura - Mikhalevski 2.5-1.5
Kasimdzhanov - L. Milov 1.5-.5
Bareev - Jussupow 2-0
Fridman - Mchedlishvili 1.5-.5
Karpov - Hamdouchi 2-0

Quarterfinals:
Kasimdzhanov - Fridman 1.5-.5
Karpov - Guliyev 2-0
Bareev - V. Milov 3-1
Nakamura - van Wely 3-1

Pretty nice company for Nakamura in the final four, and hopefully a win in this event (very possible, but far from guaranteed) will gain him some invites for 2008.

As many of my fellow local chess players know, I've been doing my driving in an old car. An oooooold car. There's good news and bad news, though. The good news is that I'm not driving that car anymore; the bad news is because it's dead. (Not that it was ever alive to begin with, but never mind.) So...if anyone in the continental U.S., preferably but not necessarily near my area (near Notre Dame) has a fairly reliable, not terribly expensive car they're looking to unload (or wishes to offer car-buying advice), he or she is welcome to drop me a note, here.

For many years Americans seeking IM and GM norms had very few options available to them. There was the World Open, the US Open, and...there were the First Saturday tournaments in Europe. The opportunities are still fairly limited, but things are getting better. The Mechanics Institute chess club in San Francisco has been running norm events for some time, and now Sevan Muradian of the North American Chess Association has started running norm events in Chicago.

The latest such event started earlier today (Sunday), and includes IMs Dave Vigorito, Stephen Muhammed and Angelo Young; among the norm aspirants the most media-interesting one is Ray Robson (USCF 2396, FIDE 2368), who just turned 13 this past Thursday.

Those interested in following the games can do so on the Monroi site, here.

A couple of days ago I expressed surprise at the result of the Fressinet-Kosteniuk game, won by Black in 237 moves. The problem, recall, was that the players reached the notorious rook and bishop vs. rook ending on move 121, and despite the 50-move rule the game continued another 116 moves. When Fressinet resigned, he was losing the exchange or getting mated in two, but by the standard rules of the game he could still have declared a draw.

Now, because it's a rapid game the players did not keep score, but it still seemed that there must have been some mechanism by which Fressinet could have claimed the draw. As I wrote in a comment to that post, "I wonder too if the game was displayed on a monitor for the audience. If so, Fressinet should have taken a look at it to see what move it was when the original RBr ending began and then monitored it for the draw." If you wondered too, then have a look at the remarkable video near the bottom of this page (narrated by Kosteniuk herself).

The first interesting, relevant aspect is seen in the Korchnoi-Fressinet game. Korchnoi requested, and was granted, a three-time repetition, indicating that draw claims could (successfully) be made even without a scoresheet.

Second, as is abundantly clear when the Fressinet-Kosteniuk clip is showing, the audience's game display, complete with move numbers, is overwhelming clear and close to the players. Maybe he'd have get up and take a step or two to the right to see it clearly, but as he had 2-3 minutes pretty much throughout the ending, he had the time to do so.

(A third and not particularly relevant point: it was a special treat to hear music composed by Philidor. (It's a terrific irony that Kosteniuk won the ending using a technique named for the man himself.))

So: the plot thickens. Can any French readers in the audience ask Fressinet for the full story?

In addition to the weekly videos I've been posting to the "Training Videos From the Masters" forum on ChessVideos.tv, I've just uploaded a briefer presentation discussing a 3-minute game I played yesterday against an IM. (Admittedly, it's a little ridiculous to analyze blitz games, but hopefully you'll find it entertaining.) Have a look!

The FIDE World Cup takes place from November 22 through December 18, 2007, in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, and you can find the first round pairings for this enormous knockout event here (unfortunately, you'll need to download it from that page using one of the links on the left). It's an interesting event because of the field's quantity and quality, but above all because this event has some role to play in the next world championship cycle.

If I understand this diagram correctly, it looks like my belief (and wish, frankly) that Topalov had lost his special privileges with Anand's triumph in Mexico City was mistaken. So, 2008 will (hopefully) see two world championship-relevant events: the Anand-Kramnik match, of course, but also a match between Topalov and the winner of the aforementioned World Cup, with the two match winners playing a world championship match in 2009.

The European Team Championships started today (October 28) and will continue through November 7. My European readers have their favorite teams, but chess fans without a dog in the fight might want to keep an eye out for the individual players - for starters, there are 14 players over 2700:

1. Vassily Ivanchuk 2787 (as soon as he can get there, now that his rapid match is over)
2. Veselin Topalov 2769
3. Alexander Morozevich 2755
4. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov 2752
5. Teimour Radjabov 2742
6. Levon Aronian 2741
7. Alexei Shirov 2739
8. Peter Svidler 2732
9. Michael Adams 2729
10. Evgeny Alexeev 2716
11. Alexander Grischuk 2715
12. Magnus Carlsen 2714
13. Vladimir Akopian 2713
14. Dmitry Jakovenko 2710

It doesn't exactly get weak after that, either, so there should be a lot of great games in the tournament - even if players try to be a little more solid than usual for the sake of the team. Both ICC and especially ChessBase's Playchess.com servers have been relaying the games, so it's worth taking a look when you have the time.

Whether because Leko played better or Ivanchuk lost form, day 3 was a mini-disaster for the Ukranian. Ivanchuk entered day 3 with a two point lead, but lost both Black games and drew twice with White, concluding the 12-game series in a 6-6 tie. The tie was resolved in a two-game blitz playoff, and after a draw with White, Ivanchuk took the last game, with Black, to win the match by a hair.

Leko did very well to come back, and in a way I'm even more impressed that Ivanchuk managed to win the final game with the Black pieces. As great as he is, he has often choked in high pressure situations, so it's nice to see him rise to the occasion here.

The rapid games can be found on the event site (click the Games tab), but they don't seem to have the blitz games, at least not yet.

UPDATE: The second, decisive blitz game can be found on the ChessBase site, here. The final position is noteworthy:



Have you ever seen this giant "V" configuration (along the a4-d1-h5 diagonals) before in a real game?

New day, same story: Ivanchuk won the second of the four games, drew the rest, and enters tomorrow's finale with a two point lead. It's only a rapid match, but it's still a very impressive performance by the great Ukranian.

Games here (click on the games tab).

1. The European Blitz Championship took place on Thursday and Friday in Corsica, France, and was won by Vladislav Tkachiev with 25.5/32, a point ahead of Laurent Fressinet and another half point ahead of Anatoly Karpov. Full results here.

2. Last Saturday (October 20), a rapid event took place in Beersheva. It was won by GM Maxim Rodshtein with a very impressive score of 6.5/7, made all the more impressive in that 6 of his 7 opponents were also grandmasters, including such heavy hitters as Boris Gelfand (second with 6/7) and Ilya Smirin (who finished in just 6th place with 2.5 points).

3. In another rapid tournament in Beersheva (no date given), Methuselah Korchnoi tied for first with Khuzman (often spelled "Huzman") with 6.5/9.

4. The World Blitz Championship will take place in Moscow in late November, after the very prestigious Tal Memorial concludes (the lineup for that event includes Kramnik and Ivanchuk). In between, world champ Anand and ex-champ Kramnik will play a two-game match (on November 23)...or rather, Anand and a chess engine and Kramnik and a chess engine will play a two-game match (time control G/30).

HT for all of the above: Chess Today.

And in excellent style, too, scoring 7 out of 9 and achieving a 2822 TPR. He did have one hiccup along the way, losing on the Black side of a Classical King's Indian against Josep Oms in round 7. Happily, he quickly bounced back, winning his last two games to finish a point ahead of Lenier Dominguez, who was in turn half a point ahead of Vugar Gashimov and Alexander Beliavsky.

The tournament website is here, and the Oms-Nakamura game is here, with my analysis (partially based on Nakamura's brief comments a few minutes after the game).

I was leafing through Alexander Kotov's Play Like a Grandmaster the other day, and in the section "Chessboard Drama" of chapter 3 ("Combinational Vision") he presented a number of studies, including these two:


Kazantsev 1964; White to move and win


Composer? Kotov doesn't say (and doesn't take credit) and it's not in the Study Database. White wins.

The first is a reasonable study, but cooked (there are multiple White wins), while the second is completely ridiculous (White has mate in one or two at every point in the study), but both conclude with fantastic final positions. Try to solve the first one, looking first for logical ideas (for the sorts of moves that look like they'd be intended by a composer), but don't even bother with the second. The real fun in both cases is in the seeing more than in the solving, and you can find the composers' intended solutions here.

A few days ago, when reporting on the rapid chess event in Villandry (won by GM Laurent Fressinet), I mentioned that his one loss in the final to GM Alexandra Kosteniuk was a 237-mover. I didn't see the game anywhere, but reader Rob Eisler kindly wrote in with the score, which he found on Tim Krabbé's excellent Open Chess Diary.

It has to be said that the game was quite strange. After 78 moves, Kosteniuk had a rook and bishop against Fressinet's rook and pawn, and on move 121 she managed to win the pawn. Rook and bishop vs. rook is hard to defend in a rapid game, but at least one only has to defend it for 50 moves. Right? Apparently not. Fressinet defended very well for a long time, mostly by means of the second-rank defense, but around the late 210s he started losing the thread. He wasn't able to set up the second-rank defense and didn't set up the Cochrane defense either. Without having either of those techniques handy, it's just about impossible for anyone but a computer to play it right, and on move 228 Fressinet's position was lost. Kosteniuk quickly set up a Philidor-like position, though she erred on move 233. Two moves later Fressinet returned the favor, and then Kosteniuk played the right moves. After her 237th move, Fressinet either had to sac his rook for her bishop or get mated in no more than two moves.

Or...he could have declared a draw. Could he have really forgotten about the 50-move rule? As the game was a rapid one, they probably weren't writing down the moves, but surely there's some mechanism by which a player can be protected from this sort of endless torture. Unless the fault is wholly Fressinet's for never declaring a draw, it's a minor outrage that FIDE's rules allow this sort of thing to happen. Does anyone know what the rapid rules are, and/or what actually happened in the event?

Here's the game, with some comments on a few crucial moments in the rook and bishop vs. rook ending.

The Ukranian star got off to a good start on day 1 of their 3-day, 12-game rapid match, winning one game and drawing three. He wasn't in trouble in a single game and had some advantage in two of the drawn games, so unless he's discouraged about only winning one game, Ivanchuk should be in a confident mood for the next two days.

The games can be replayed on the match site; unfortunately, there's no direct link, so when you get there you'll need to click on the Games tab.

If you haven't had enough of Kasparov's road show on American TV yet (60 Minutes, the Colbert Report, Maher's HBO show and Hardball), you can watch him repeat his talking points this weekend on the (Wall Street) Journal Editorial Report (on the Fox News Network). To wit: Russia is a police state; he's not trying to win an election but to have free elections; his name gives him some protection but not "ultimate protection"; America was a beacon of hope to the communist world in the 70s and 80s but isn't any more, given their inconsistent promotion of democracy across the world (I wonder if he'll soft-sell this point for a more conservative audience); Putin isn't trying to create WW III, but only wants to create enough worldwide instability to drive up oil prices for the sake of the "corporation" KGB, Inc., etc.

Show times here.

Garry Kasparov isn't playing (serious) chess any more, but he certainly keeps busy. In addition to writing massive tomes on chess history and leading the opposition to Putin (or "Putinism"), he has found time to make his own contribution to the glutted business/success book market. The book, How Life Imitates Chess (note: the foregoing link includes a mini-interview with Kasparov), may be of dual interest to chess fans. First, of course, the book functions as a fairly fresh entry into the business/success genre; the reader may or may not be interested in that subject matter. But he does tell some interesting chess stories as well, and that might be reason enough to buy the book.

Rather than write my own review, however, the point of this post is to send you to (USCF master) Chris Chabris's, in today's Wall Street Journal.

It's only a rapid match, but even so, it will be great to see two very highly rated players with contrasting styles go at it for 12 games over the next three days. Vassily Ivanchuk has had a spectacular year, but most of his successes have come in tournaments of mixed composition. Peter Leko, on the other hand, hasn't had as strong a 2007 as Ivanchuk, but he's always playing against only top-class opposition. It will also be interesting to see who wins the opening battle: Leko with his deep, comparatively narrow preparation or Ivanchuk with his diverse repertoire.

The event takes place in Mukachevo, Ukraine, and the games start at 3, 4, 5 and 6 p.m. on each of Friday through Sunday. (Those are local times, which are 2 hours later than GMT and thus 7 hours later than ET. So woe to you in California: the games start each day at 5 a.m.)

Website here.

Although he has long been a Najdorf specialist, Mexico City runner-up (technically third, on tiebreak) Boris Gelfand isn't generally counted among the more dynamic players of our era. There are reasons for this (his use of the Catalan with White and the Petroff with Black, together with his inadequate (from the fan's perspective) antipathy toward short draws), but overall it's a mistake - as we'll see. As for his opponent, Alexei Shirov, there's no doubt among chess fans about his love of crazy positions. And when you put the two together, the result is often mind-boggling, with both players having won brilliancies against each other.

This week's show will see such a game - but with a bit of a Halloween twist. This was the first of two games in their first round mini-match (played in the 1992 Immopar rapid event in Paris; the event was won by Kasparov, who defeated Anand in the final), and although Gelfand opened with the Catalan, the position soon became insanely complex. Gelfand sacrificed a pawn, then a rook, a piece, and another piece - and he probably should have given even more! In return he enjoyed a massive attack and an objectively won position.

But did he win? Aye, there's the rub. This game is another entry into the museum of missed brilliancies, but it's a wonderful game just the same - in fact, Gelfand includes it in his book of memorable games (a terrific book, by the way). It is truly a game worth seeing, and I hope you'll join me this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET; you'll be glad you did! (Just be prepared to see some really staggering tactics - this game's a roller coaster.)

Remember, the shows are free, and you can find complete directions for watching in this post.

A small event just finished in Villandry, France; a four player, rapid, knockout event that was part of a chess & music festival. Each mini-match was scheduled for two rapid games at 20' + 10", with two 3' + 2" blitz games used, if needed, for tiebreaks.

In the first round, Laurent Fressinet beat Viktor Korchnoi 2.5-1.5 and Alexandra Kosteniuk defeated Almira Skripchenko 1.5-.5, and in the final Fressinet won 3-1. What I'd like to see, though I don't know if it's available, is Kosteniuk's win in the second game against Fressinet. The reason? It went 237 moves - a record, I believe!* If anyone finds the score of that game, please drop me an email via the Contact link.



* At least for tournament games. I once played a blitz game (10 seconds, plus 1-second increments) that went 2717 moves. (That's right, it's not a typo: 2717 moves.)

Last week I offered my first presentation with ChessVideos.tv, and as of a few minutes ago, my second lesson can now be watched - free and on-demand! This one, like the first, highlights the perils of the uncastled king, but in a less straightforward, quick-brutal-crush style than last week's show. It's a little more sophisticated, but still accessible, entertaining and instructive. (At least I think so, but I might be biased here.)

The plan is for these shows, like those I do for ChessBase, to continue once a week, and it's your viewership that will make it possible. So watch, enjoy, and please feel free to suggest topics for future shows.

In my youth, when the world was young and dirt was interesting, one of the opening lessons I learned from the world of big-time chess was that in the Open Ruy (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.O-O Nxe4, with the standard continuation 6.d4 b5 7.Bb3 d5 8.dxe5 Be6) the move 10...g6 (after 9.Nbd2 Nc5 10.c3) was an error. Viktor Korchnoi tried it in game 8 of his 1978 world championship match against Anatoly Karpov, and he was butchered. All the analysts I saw evaluated the move as dubious or simply bad, and that was that. There was a period early in my tournament career when I played the Open Ruy, and as a result of this famous game 10...g6 never so much as entered my mind as a viable substitute for 10...d4, 10...Bg4 or 10...Be7.

Fast forward 29 years(!), to some time this past Sunday, when looking through Chess Today's daily database I came across a game between Matthias Thesing and Mihail Marin, from the new season of the Bundesliga. To my shock, Marin played 10...g6! That got my mind spinning: Maybe the position in Karpov-Korchnoi was different? Nope, same position. Maybe 10...g6 wasn't universally condemned, and Korchnoi's error, according to the commentators, came later? Nope, they all piled on against 10...g6, from the old commentators to the new - even Kasparov in My Great Predecessors (Volume 5, p. 120) joins the chorus booing 10...g6.

So what gives? Has Marin discovered something new? Was this a bluff, a one-time throwaway idea against a lower-rated player? (Thesing is a "mere" IM - a fine player in his own right but at 2393 considerably lower-rated than the 2551-rated Marin.) 10...g6 is not popular at all, but Korchnoi himself has trotted it out a couple of times since the Karpov debacle. Was I right as a kid in thinking 10...g6 was a poor move, or was this another example of seeing an unusual idea misevaluated based on the game's result?

The bottom line is that I'm not sure. I think White can gain an edge, but it's nothing fatal and the positions are more complicated than the K-K game might suggest. After reviewing a bunch of games, especially the fascinating Neeloptal-Mikhalevski encounter, I spent quite some time on 11.Nd4 Nxe5 12.f4 (a novelty, I think), and you'll find some very interesting ideas therein - most notably the queen sac 12...Nc4 13.f5! Ne3 14.fxe6!! In sum, 10...g6 is a very dangerous continuation, but it may be playable. Readers' analysis is welcomed.

Here are the games and analyses.

...can be found here (permalink here, in .pdf format), with full annotations. It's definitely worth checking out, as although the comments are given in symbols, their great virtue is that they are almost always by the players themselves. The benefit is that the commentary is almost always deeper (because it's given by a player who is extremely strong, and who is more invested in the game) and more interesting (because you're more likely to see ideas in the notes that were considered during the game in their unvarnished glory, rather than tidied-up computer-based analysis). The Informant may no longer be necessary, as it once was, but it still has its distinct and valuable place in the chess landscape.

Here are the links for part 1, part 2 and part 3. The goofy notation is a bit annoying (or is there a way to fix that?), but it's an excellent source of chess material from Kramnik's career. (HT: Brian Karen)

I'd also commend the e3e5 site in general - there's lots of interesting material there, including many articles by Dvoretsky and - to point to an oldie but goody (and one I might have mentioned before, long ago) - an article by Kramnik on his predecessors.

A couple of days ago, I came across this position from the puzzle section of Chess Today:

It's Black to move in the game Marzolo-Arencibia, Calvia Open 2007. What should he play? Please try to figure it out before proceeding.

It's a hard-hitting, informative interview...nah, I'm kidding - it's pure fluff. Still, some of you might find it mildly entertaining, and in any case it would be nice if something like this showed up on American TV.

Link.

HT: JaiDeepBlue

Both the Blindfold World Cup and the Crown Group of the Essent Festival finished today, with clear winners in each case.

Starting with the first-named event, Bu Xiangzhi entered his mini-match with Judit Polgar needing only one draw in two games to guarantee clear first, and he took care of that right away with a win in the first game. Unfortunately, his unbeaten run came to an end in the second game, when he had a choice between a probably won ending and a dangerous-looking but speculative (and objectively unsound) attack. He chose the latter and lost, but overall the tournament was a great success for him, and I hope (but doubt) that the Western press will at last give him some love.

Final Standings:

1. Bu Xiangzhi 21
2. Sergei Karjakin 17
3. Magnus Carlsen 16
4. Judit Polgar 12
5. Veselin Topalov 9
6. Penteala Harikrishna 6

(The scoring system is based on 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw.)

It's yet another mediocre result for Topalov (statistics for his opponents' restroom trips are unavailable at the time of this writing), but to be fair he doesn't have a great track record in blindfold or rapid.

On to the other tournament, the Essent Crown Group in Hoogeveens. Going into the last round, the standings saw Mamedyarov and Ponomariov with 3.5/5, van Wely with 3/5, and Andriasian with...the same number of points he started with. The pairings for the last round were Andriasian-Mamedyarov and Ponomariov-van Wely, which appeared intriguing. Andriasian's tournament was a disaster, of course, but he had White and the chance to show up at a crucial moment. Ponomariov's opponent was tougher, but at least he had White. Surprisingly, van Wely won, but so did Mamedyarov, thereby adding to his already hefty 2752 rating.

Congratulations to both winners, and also to 15-year-old* IM Eltaj Safarli of Azerbaijan**, who took clear first in the concurrently held Essent Open - ahead of 12 grandmasters.

* Maybe he's 14 - all I found was that he was born in 1992.
** Enough already with the Azeri prodigies (Kasparov, Sutovsky, Rajdabov, Mamedyarov, and plenty more) - is it something in the water there?

In a recent interview in India, new world champ Viswanathan Anand offered up two amazing statements. The first is that beating Kasparov (something he did 8 times in 78 games games, against 27 losses) was more satisfying than becoming world champion. Wow. The second is this: "There is a match waiting for him if he wants."

Maybe this is Anand having some fun with the Indian press, but the first statement is incredible and the second, if it brings about a Kasparov-Anand match (presumably after Kasparov loses in the Russian presidential election next year and - also possible but certainly iffier - if Anand defeats Kramnik), would be fantastic for the game. At least it's certainly more likely than a match between Anand and the Icelandic grandmaster!

HT: Brian Karen

The first two events are a day away from finishing, and couldn't be more different from a dramatic perspective. In the Blindfold World Cup, Bu Xiangzhi is running away with the event, absolutely crushing the opposition. He won his first three matches 1.5-.5, and in the fourth match he stepped it up, defeating Harikrishna 2-0. After 8 of 10 games, he has 18 points (remember: 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw); Carlsen is second with 12 and Karjakin third with 11. You can find more details, as well as a selection of blunders (in addition to those I presented here), in this ChessBase report.

Meanwhile, the Crown Group of the Essent Festival is coming down to the wire, with Mamedyarov and Ponomariov entering the last round tied for first with 3.5/5, and van Wely just half a point behind. Considering that there are only four players in the tournament, we almost have a Lake Wobegon situation - almost, but not quite. Unfortunately, the fourth player, 2006 World Junior Champ Zaven Andriasian, has lost every game so far. Still, he has one more round to get on the scoreboard, and that gives him the chance to determine who the winner of this event will be. (He'll have White against Mamedyarov.)

Finally, round two of the Barcelona tournament finds Nakamura and Dominguez tied for first with 2-0 scores, and Nakamura achieved his second win in style. This is a game that's going to get a lot of buzz, so you might as well jump on the bandwagon now. Have a look.

My initial ruminations can be found here, but I'd like to add to those comments. A distinction was made between simple problems (used for drilling) and more complicated problems, and the question asked which sort a player should focus on.

I answered that one should work on both: the complicated ones have their value, but it's good to take a refresher every so often on the simpler ones as well. As it turns out, though, I didn't offer a rationale for working on the complicated problems, so let me rectify that here.

Success in a chess tournament is at least in part a function of two components: one's knowledge and one's ability to perform. The first is relatively static: one either knows the theory of a particular opening variation or endgame or one doesn't, and one either knows certain fundamental tactical ideas or one does not. The second component is more dynamic: it's the ability to solve problems at the board. That ability has many sub-components: imagination, visualization skills, mental flexibility, the ability to calculate quickly and accurately, psychological strength, endurance and so on. There's no single training exercise that will develop all those virtues, but solving tough problems will help with most of them. The closer to a game situation one makes the exercise(s), the better it will be for developing the relevant skill.

So what we have, then, is not a competition between two approaches. Rather, it's complementary: reviewing/drilling simple tactics is done for the sake of building and refreshing our knowledge base, and deeper exercises are done primarily to foster our practical abilities.

Excerpted from chapter 5 of Jacob Aagaard's Excelling at Positional Chess (Everyman 2003):

1) Write down three new things you have learned from the game

2) Always write down the time spent during the game

3) Check the opening theory

4) Write down the critical moments of the game, the things you saw during the game and what you think went wrong. Do this the same evening.

5) Analyse the game yourself. Only when finished should you refer to Fritz

6) Check for structural assistance in ChessBase to gain additional insight [DM: he's referring primarily, but not solely, to pawn structures]

7) Tournament reports and diagnosis of weaknesses [DM: List your mistakes, describe them, and look especially for those that are most serious and that recur.]

8) Training based on tournament reports


Good advice! It's a lot of work (though it's not really that bad once you get going), but it will help one improve tremendously.

This event looks interesting: it's pretty strong and has a nice blend of players. There are youngsters like Hikaru Nakamura, Vugar Gashimov and Lenier Dominguez; but also such veteran stars as Alexander Beliavsky, Rafael Vaganian and Miguel Illescas, too. (The other players are Michal Krasenkow, Marc Narciso, Jordi Fluvia and Josep Oms.) It's a round robin, continuing through the 26th of this month, and it got off to a great start with the Nakamura-Fluvia battle - you have to see this one.

If you enjoy my weekly presentations on ChessBase and want to see more, you're in luck: my first audio lesson for ChessVideos.TV is up and ready for your listening and viewing pleasure. The video is here (but it should have been titled something like "Exploiting the Uncastled King") and can be watched at your leisure.

I hope you like it - please let me know what you think.

Akiba (or Akiva) Rubinstein was one of the greatest players never to become world champion, and possibly the greatest player never given the opportunity to contest for the title. In the years from around 1909 to 1912, he was probably the strongest player in the world, capable of winning every tournament and defeating all rivals - and he just about did. He was a brilliant openings innovator who won beautiful games of every sort, but he's probably best remembered today for his exquisite endgame technique. Accurate, artistic and patient, his endgames offer a model for aspiring players to learn from even today.

As you may have surmised, we'll look at one such ending in this week's show, from his game with Stefano Rosselli del Turco from the Baden-Baden tournament of 1925. Rosselli, with White, started the game on a threatening note with 1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bc4 Nxe4 4.Qh5, seemingly inviting the so-called Frankenstein-Dracula Variation with 4...Nd6 5.Bb3 Nc6 6.Nb5 g6 7.Qf3 f5 8.Qd5 Qe7 9.Nxc7+ Kd8 10.Nxa8 b6. It's a very exciting line, with Black enjoying a lead in development and central space in return for the exchange and a pawn. Alas, it turned out that Rosselli was bluffing, and instead of 5.Bb3 he played the insipid 5.Qxe5+, perhaps thinking that after 5...Qe7 6.Qxe7+ Bxe7 he'd achieve a quick and painless draw with his great opponent.

If so, he was badly mistaken. Though material was even, the board was queenless and the pawn structure was symmetrical, Rubinstein proved that there was plenty of play left in the position. It took him a long time to win, but as we investigate the game, we'll see that it wasn't a dry effort at all. Better still, we can use Rubinstein's ideas in our own games - especially against draw-eager opponents. Maybe the position after move 6 would be easily drawn in a world championship competition, but for mortals like us - and Rosselli - holding the game against a Rubinstein is not automatic.

I think you'll enjoy the game, learn a lot about the ending, and be entertained by our brief foray into Frankenstein-Dracula theory, too. So tune in this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET - hope to see you then!

(As always, directions for watching the show - it's free - can be found here.)

NQ, who may identify himself further if he wishes public acknowledgement for his useful question, wrote the following:

Hey Dennis!

First off, I really enjoy reading your blog and going over your analysis. I know that quite a few people look up to you, so I was thinking that at some point you may like to comment on an aspect of chess training that's relevant to most of your readership (i.e.: "improving" players) , namely the type of tactical training that we should do in order to improve our game.

I know, it's a groan-worthy topic, beaten to death, etc. The thing is, while I was able to find a lot of agreement on certain points (practice regularly, don't move the pieces, etc.) , there seems to be two opposing camps. One says that you should do difficult, or at least mixed problems. The other focuses on simple problems that, by drilling them repeatedly, become embedded into our gray matter. Is there a school of thought that you favor?

In any event, thanks a lot for keeping up such a fun and high-quality site.

NQ

First, thanks for the kind words. Now to your question: should we study difficult or at least mixed problems, or should we focus on drilling on simple problems? My answer, of course, is yes. (We should do both!)

But let me give a more specific and, I hope, helpful answer. For younger/less experienced players, those simple problems are also difficult,so they get a 2-for-1 special. Once the typical Reinfeld-level puzzle book has been mastered, it's time to move on to something more challenging. At that point, I think one should work on puzzles that are more challenging, but I also think it's good to engage in a refresher every so often. It's great to find subtle 11 move combinations, but it's less great if you're also missing basic tactics.

In sum: step 1: achieve competence with basic patterns (pins, forks, skewers, discovered and double attacks, common mating patterns, etc.). Step 2: branch out into more complicated tactics, but review basic themes (though not necessarily in basic books) every so often to keep those patterns fresh in your mind.

I'll give an approximate and non-technical explanation of why I think this is important. In my view elementary tactics aren't consciously found by us, but are delivered by our unconscious thought processes. We don't find them (I'd be shocked to learn of any player over 1600 (or, to be honest, any non-beginner at all) who explicitly looks for forks, then pins, then skewers, then x-ray attacks, etc.); rather, we find ourselves noticing them, or at least that it's a position where the idea "feels" present. Think about this common phenomenon: we usually drive down the street completely oblivious to the make and model of other cars, but there are exceptions. For example, if we've just bought a new car, we will in that case very easily notice other cars of the same type - and without actively looking for them. In some way, we've made that that sort of pattern - the pattern exemplified by that style of car - important to us, and because our minds have devoted so much attention to it, we notice that pattern all over the place. Tactics and other chess ideas work the same way, but as our attentiveness to a particular idea can fade over time, the occasional review is good.

These events are at different stages: the first is over, the second is on a rest day at the midway point, and the last one just started. Here's a summary of each:

First, the World Junior Championships ended yesterday with clear winners: Egyptian GM Ahmed Adly won the open/boys' section with 10/13; Russian Ivan Popov was half a point behind with 9.5/13, and Wang Hao of China and Dmitry Andreikin of Russia tied for 3rd-4th another half a point back. (I don't know if they both received bronze medals or if some sort of tiebreaker was used. If someone else knows, please pass the info along in the combox.)

In the girls' section, Vera Nebolsina took clear first - like Adly with a 10/13 score. Second and third were taken by Jolanta Zawadzka of Poland and Salome Melia of Georgia, respectively, both with 9.5 points.

Next, after the first cycle of the double-round robin Crown Group of the Essent Festival in Hoogeveen, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov leads with 2.5 out of of 3. Former FIDE champ Ruslan Ponomariov has 2 out of 3, Loek van Wely has 1.5 points, and last year's World Junior Champion is getting bruised: he has a big goose egg so far.

Finally, there's the Blindfold World Cup in Bilbao, Spain. The participants are Veselin Topalov, Magnus Carlsen, Judit Polgar, Penteala Harikrishna, Sergei Karjakin and Bu Xiangzhi. They're using an aggression-favoring scoring system: 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, so after the round 1 results

Bu Xiangzhi - Karjakin 1.5-.5
Carlsen - Harikrishan 1.5-.5
Polgar - Topalov 1-1

the scores look like this:

1-2. Carlsen, Bu Xiangzhi 4
3-4. Polgar, Topalov 3
5-6. Karjakin, Harikrishna 1

(For those with a little free time at the moment, round 2 has just gotten underway.)

Now for some games. From the World Junior, "AB" pointed to eventual winner Adly's round 9 game against Wang Hao as noteworthy. Unfortunately, it's a loss, but I'll present it for two reasons. First, it is a nice endgame victory by the young Chinese star; second, it immediately reminded me of a Short-Polgar game from 2003. That game is presented as well, and I think you'll agree that the resemblance is striking.

Next, I present a couple of catastrophes from round 1 of the Blindfold World Cup. That sort of thing used to happen all the time in the Amber tournament, but those players seem to have acclimated to the format. Happily for those of us who indulge in the occasional bout of schadenfreude, a new blindfold event brings new blunders, as you'll see.

Here are the games.

I don't have the game any longer (it was a Nimzo/Queen's Indian hybrid, drawn), but I do have a picture of me against GM Walter Browne. It was round 3 of my last tournament before quitting for about 5 years. Here it is:



Ah, where did the hair go?

I played in the Midwest Class Championships this past weekend, and played reasonably well (3 out of 5, losing 4 USCF rating points, gaining 21 FIDE points, and winning my EF back with a little extra). I lost in the first round to a 2057, prompting a commentator to ask how this could happen. Well, I handed him a script before the game, full of great ideas: he was supposed to quake in fear, play a lame opening, and then resign around move 30. Unfortunately, he seemed to misplace it, forgot to lose and won a good fight.

Of course, it was disappointing, though I recovered the rest of the way. But the further course of his tournament was remarkable: his next two games were draws against 2400s, then he beat another master, and for dessert he drew GM Dmitry Gurevich in the last round to tie for second. This is a 2057?!

Another terror in the event - one I didn't play - was a 9-year old expert named Brian Luo. Like me, he went 3-2, with his only loss coming to IM Emory Tate. Tate was fortunate, though - he took too many liberties in the opening and was in big trouble: Luo had an extra pawn and an attack, but he got too happy. He had temporarily sacrificed a piece, but instead of regaining it he tried to win a second extra pawn. He got the pawn, but couldn't regain the piece, and Tate won easily after that. Nevertheless, he looks like he'll be a force to reckon with, and it doesn't hurt that he's studying with Gurevich.

There's a nasty little brouhaha involving GM Susan Polgar and her husband, FM Paul Truong, on one side and Sam Sloan on the other. I've read a bit about this (this BCC post is a good place to start for those who want to go slogging through this mudhole), but have steadfastly avoided the temptation to comment about this. (The gist, in a sentence, is that Sloan accuses Polgar and/or Truong of writing inflammatory posts in his (Sloan's) name on various chess websites.)

Unfortunately, I discovered yesterday that Sam Sloan decided to drag me into this dispute by blatantly misrepresenting something I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago. Some of you may recall that I wrote a post (back on September 5, 2005) called "Go, Nona!". The post celebrated some recent accomplishments by and accolades for the former women's world champion, Nona Gaprindashvili, and en passant I took the opportunity to express a critical opinion of the sometime claim by Susan Polgar to be the first woman to earn the grandmaster title. (See the post for details.)

The result was a slew of comments, and then another big collection when I created a new post for the purpose of allowing still more reader feedback on the same topic. Almost all of them - all pro-Polgar - came from the same IP, as I detailed in a third post. Did I identify the person? NO. Here's what I wrote:

[M]y "many" respondents shared not only exceptionally similar viewpoints and ways of expressing them; it turns out, by a no doubt astonishing coincidence, that they share a common IP address as well. In short, all of the above are the same person, or at most, a very small group of people sharing the same computer or local network. It certainly isn't a collection of diverse, independent people from around the globe; rather, it's just a cheap stunt by (probably) one individual who misguidedly thinks this will improve Susan Polgar's reputation and help her cause.

That should be clear enough, but to my horror, Sam Sloan has written the following:

Dennis Monokroussos reports that Polgar and Truong have posted to his blog under 36 different fake names. He has banned all 36.

What???? In addition to the strange "reports", which makes it sound like something that just happened (as opposed to a series of two-year-old events), the claim that I single out and blame Polgar and Truong is absolutely, positively false. Sloan next gives the URL of the third Chess Mind post mentioned above (where I never offer any names for the culprit(s)), and then continues

This happened after Monokroussos posted an article entitled "Go, Nona!" in which he celebrated Nona Gaprindashvili as the first chess grandmaster.

Gaprindashvili would have had to play in St. Petersburg 1914 to receive that honor. Let's try this: she was the first woman to receive the grandmaster title.

The 36 fake posters replied that Nona Gaprindashvili was not a real grandmaster. Susan Polgar was. Monokroussos found it strange that all 36 posters that said that claimed to be in different parts of the world, yet they all had the same IP address. He reports, "overweening Polgarites in the past were all just this same person".

Again not quite right, though my rebuttals here concern minor points. First, there were more than 36 posters - that figure applies to the second post. Second, the quotation is from a comment of mine to the post - it wasn't part of my "report". As I stated in the quotation above (this post's fourth paragraph), it might have been one person, but it might have been several. I don't know.

In any event, returning to the most important point, I make no statement about the identity of the person in question. If, therefore, any of you know Mr. Sloan or post to his site please ask him to change his post to align it with the truth. Likewise, Mr. Sloan, if you're reading this, please make the proper corrections.

Blecch to the whole lousy situation.

On the train to visit a friend, and maybe play in a chess tournament, I was browsing Mihail Marin's Beating the Open Games. On balance, my impression of the book is quite favorable, but I was taken aback by the following quotation:

This novelty has a curious history.

When preparing for games, I frequently consult my own articles, CD's [sic] or books in order to refresh my memory. This has proved rather efficient so far, which is a consequence of the fact that I am generally sincere when writing about my openings. (Page 227; emphasis added.)

Now, I do sympathize with the plight of the GM author. On the one hand, he is expected to present accurate and truthful information: this is his duty to his publisher, the audience, and, I would add, a general moral obligation. On the other hand, he needs to perform as a player, and if he's got a few terrific improvements on current theory ready to hand, it's hard to just give them away when they could net him several hundred or even several thousand dollars. Maybe one possibility is to simply present current theory in the relevant lines, and in that way the readers are getting current information and the author doesn't have to tell any lies.

So I do understand his plight, but nonetheless, it's disconcerting to read a comment like the one given above. Generally sincere? Great. It's one thing to know that an author is finite and fallible - that's a given. But to pay him to lie to me? That's completely unacceptable.

Your thoughts, readers?

Congratulations to Lithuanian IM Algimantas Butnorius, who won the 17th World Senior Chess Championship (in Gmunden, Austria) with the fine score of 9/11. Half a point back were Vasiukov, Jansa, and Shabanov, and many other noteworthy players could be found further back.

HT: Chess Today

This high level event wrapped up a couple of days ago, and while I as a chess fan don't care too much about which team won what (all the teams were essentially mercenary - it's not as if regional groupings were overly (at all?) relevant - and it's not as if teammate one can do anything to help teammate two), the number of great players involved made it an enjoyable event.

For those who are interested, the winning team was Linex Magic Merida, featuring the homogenous, geographically natural team of Gata Kamsky (USA), Michael Adams (ENG), Sergei Rublevsky (RUS), Gabriel Sargissian (ARM), Ivan Cheparinov (BUL) (all strong GMs), IM Manuel Perez Candelario (ESP) and FM Ivan Cabezas Ayala (ESP). The winning team for the women's event was similarly incomprehensible: Cercle d'Echecs de Monte-Carlo amalgamated Humpy Koneru of India (who had a fantastic 2800 TPR!), Pia Cramling of Sweden, Zhu Chen of Qatar, Monica Socko of Poland and Almira Skripchenko of France.

Far more interesting to me were the games, and I've picked out five from the last round. First, the fall of Ivanchuk. He had been enjoying yet another exceptional event, going +3 =3 in the first six rounds, and he enjoyed a better position in the middlegame against Rajdabov in the last round, too. Things were proceeding smoothly and logically, even after his sacrificed a piece for two pawns, but with the catastrophic 44.Qxe5 all was lost.

Anand meanwhile increased his lead at the top of the FIDE rating list by defeating Yannick Pelletier; the game is a nice example of a stronger player outplaying an opponent a little bit at a time.

Carlsen continued to perform well, and we'll see his nice win over Fressinet. The game's a typical Ruy Lopez win for White, where a positional advantage was converted into something tangible when a tactical opportunity presented itself.

The fourth game was a quick draw, but a theoretically significant one in a line of the Queen's Indian we've kept track of on this blog. Finally, an unannotated game - but one the readers would be well-served to analyze on their own (especially those readers who are also my students!): the slugfest between Morozevich and van Wely.

Here's the tournament website, here's ChessBase's final report on the event (with videos), and here are the aforementioned games (with my comments - except for the last game).

I've added a link to the Chess Informant website on my sidebar, and hope those not already familiar with that company and its products will at least give it the once-over. The Informant isn't quite the essential product it once was, but it's still on the short list of near-essentials for serious tournament players.

So what is it? It's a product that used to come out twice a year (starting with its inception in the fine year of 1966) and now makes three appearances per annum, and comprises six main sections. The first and by far the largest is a collection of high-level games played since the last installment, all annotated, most of the time by one of the players or his (or her) second or trainer. (This is the main way in which the Informants have not been supplanted by ChessBase Magazine. CBMs have annotated games, but in my experience there's a very big difference between a player's analysis and that of a third party, even when the third party is just as good as the participants.)

Informants also contain a combination and an endgame section - these are generally excellent, again based on the best offerings of the previous few months. Two other classic sections give the voting stats and the winning entries in two categories: the best game and the best (most important) novelty of the previous Informant. This is an excellent way of directing attention to important theoretical trends. Finally, for about a decade or so, each Informant has come with a mini-informant on some great player, presenting some of his best games, combinations, endgames and novelties.

At one time these were essential for all players of any seriousness; today, they still remain quite useful. The Informant's publishers offer other useful works as well, most famously the "ECO" (Encyclopedia of Chess Openings) in five volumes. As with the Informants, the books are languageless, but what they lack in thematic guidance they make up for in detail. Trying to learn an opening using ECO is about as interesting as learning math by using log tables, but as a reference resource they can be very helpful.

Have a look and see what you think. Also, you can see loads of samples over on the Chess Cafe site - try this link and start spelunking.

Yes, it's time for ChessBase shows again!

We'll start back up this week, our first post-world championship show, with a look back at the first (real) FIDE world champ, Mikhail Botvinnik. The "Patriarch", as he is sometimes called, has cast an immense shadow over 20th century chess, having made an impact as a player (for starters, he was the world champion for 13 of 15 years from 1948 to 1963), as the leader of Soviet chess, as the model of the contemporary professional, as a trainer (among his pupils one can count Karpov and especially Kasparov) and even as a chess programmer.

We could all recite his resume and be impressed, but it's better to look at and learn from his chess. Many of his best games are strategic masterpieces, and that's what we'll see this week, in his 1960 victory over (then West) German grandmaster Lother Schmid. Schmid is obviously a fine player in his own right, and in addition to his over the board chess successes he's also noteworthy in at least four other respects. First, he has one of the largest chess libraries in the world. Second, he had the surreal experience of serving as the arbiter for the 1972 world championship match. Third, he has enjoyed great successes as a correspondence player, coming in second in the 2nd world correspondence championship. And fourth, he has a chess opening named after - the Schmid Benoni - and that's what was played in our game.

Schmid rattled off his first ten moves against Botvinnik, and it was all perfectly thematic, as we will see. It looked like he was in time for his thematic break on b5, and White too late with his on e5. Botvinnik, of course, had other ideas, and it's both fascinating and instructive to see these two very strong players battle for their conceptions. It's an entertaining game, comparatively low on theory and tactics, but very useful for understanding key Benoni concepts.

Since it has been a while, it bears repeating that the show takes place Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET; you can find more details for watching (it's free) here.

You might think that the title of this post is slightly sarcastic, but it really isn't. To assure a nice, easy, boring - or boring-looking - draw in high level chess when playing Black against an opponent who's trying, you need to do something at least a little special. The GMs who are in these games recognize the subtlety of the ideas and, yes, the beauty of the plans - even if they're used to spectator-unfriendly ends. But for the amateur and casual fan, it's more easily missed. This is understandable, but every so often it's worth taking a closer look at these marvelously efficient efforts to see what makes them tick.

So let's have a closer look at the game Eljanov(2681) - Anand(2801) from today's round of the European Club Cup. The game was an exciting Moscow Variation Semi-Slav, and followed the dramatic Kramnik - Anand game from Mexico City all the way through White's 20th move. Anand varied on move 20, and ten moves later the game was abandoned as a draw. In the earlier game, the play was quite unclear but saw White enjoy the initiative much of the way through; today, however, Anand succeeded brilliantly in taking all the spunk out of Eljanov's position.

Intrigued yet? Have a look.

Goodbye, monkey (on back)! The offense isn't brilliant, but the defense has been and is good enough that if they're given any chance at all, the games can be a fight. Hopefully this will give "us" the confidence we need to be competent the rest of the way. We'll need it, as next week the (hated, loathed, abhorrent) Boston College team comes to town.

I'm not sure what's wrong with playing chess with one's eyes open, but Bilbao, Spain has organized a double round-robin event to be held from the 16th through the 20th of October with Topalov, Carlsen, J. Polgar, Bu Xiangzhi, Karjakin and Harikrishna participating. It should be fun, though without Kramnik or Morozevich playing - the traditional blindfold champs in the Amber tournament each year - it shouldn't be considered a blindfold world championship. (I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the er, lack of friendship between Topalov and those two may have something to do with this.)

Website here.

HT: Chess Today.

There's a very interesting story and video in the September 30, 2007 WaPo Magazine about a park hustler named Tom Murphy; a player who, apparently, is quite a bit more than a park hustler. Have a look.

With so many strong players involved in the European Club Cup (see this post for a partial, sufficiently scary list), it's only fair to expect some brilliant, flashy games - and who better than Latvian/Russian/Spanish GM Alexei Shirov to be involved in this creative endeavor? Have a look at his game with the young Belorussian GM Sergei Azarov, and enjoy.

Link.

Some years it's more prestigious than others, but it's almost always worth paying at least a little attention to the World U20 Championships - the real junior championships. This year they are taking place in Yerevan, Armenia, from October 2-17; 15 GMs are participating, including Wang Hao, Daniel Stellwagen, Georg Meier, Dmitry Andreikin, David Howell and Parimarjan Negi.

Website here.

Evgeny Bareev and Ilya Levitov's From London to Elista: The Inside Story of the Three Matches that Vladimir Kramnik Played for the World Chess Championship ought to be a terrific book, for at least three reasons. First, Bareev is a very strong grandmaster, periodically rated over 2700, so his insights into the games should be very insightful and instructive. Second, he is known for his sardonic sense of humor, so his comments on the matches - especially the Topalov match - ought to be especially amusing. (I'm assuming the content is all Bareev's, and that Levitov is more of an editor or ghostwriter.) Third, Bareev is an insider: he was one of Kramnik's seconds in the Kasparov match, and he has long been a good friend of the new ex-world champ.

This is definitely a book I'm looking forward to.

HT: Brian Karen

We resume with first things first. At 8 p.m. today, Eastern Time (5 p.m. Pacific Time), the Fighting Irish (5-0*) take on UCLA (notable alumni: Marcia Clark [of O.J. trial fame] and Michael Dukakis) in sunny southern Cal.

For your pre-game entertainment, you can see a highlights package of last year's dramatic game here, or go to this page to find lots and lots of preview material.

I'm not 100% yet, but well enough to return to a pretty normal life - including blogging. So here comes a fresh batch of posts. Get all your friends to come back and start reading again!

Probably not. I've been pretty sick in the wake of the trip and then the subsequent tournament (awwwwwww), and have no idea how I'll feel tomorrow night at 9 p.m. ET. I think I'll simply show up if I feel up to it, and if it seems to me in advance that I'll be good to go, I'll post a blurb at some point tomorrow.

Time to rest.

This prestigious team event started earlier today in Antalya-Kemer, Turkey, and features such superstars as Radjabov, Shirov, Grischuk, Akopian, Jakovenko, Kasimdzhanov, Karjakin, Carlsen, Svidler, Bacrot, Topalov, Ponomariov, Onischuk, Ivanchuk, Kamsky, Adams, Rublevsky, van Wely and Mamedyarov - and that's not even a complete list of the heavyweights! It's clearly worth keeping an eye on, and the place to start is with the event site, here.

HT: Chess Today.

Link brought to you by my better half. (It's for the first article linked to in the previous post.)

I suspect many of you already saw the link to the huge New Yorker article about Kasparov and Russian politics, but if not, here it is. Puny by comparison, and more focused on Putin's latest maneuvers than on Kasparov's, is this article from the Wall Street Journal. It offers at least one bit of information that was new to me; to wit, that Putin may give up the Presidency but serve as Prime Minister once his term is up.

Finally, on a different political matter, some readers might find this article on the U.S.-Iraq situation of interest, as it at least provides a sustained argument for a position not generally articulated in the media. (This is in part true for trivial reasons: it's rare to see a sustained argument for any position in the mass media - most people would zonk off.) (N.B. Linking does not imply endorsement, so any readers who want to fire away on the topic are asked to cool their jets.)

Essent is a yearly chess festival that takes place in Hoogeveen, with the main event a four-player double round-robin. In the past the formula was to have a world champion, a local, a strong female player and the world junior champion. This year they only have three of the four slots filled (Ponomariov the world champ, van Wely the local and Zaven Andriasyan the world junior champ), with Mamedyarov substituting for the strong female player. Considering that he's #7 in the world, it's a good substitution! The event runs from October 12-20; the tournament website is here.

Later in the month (from October 25-28), in Mukachevo, Ukraine, Vassily Ivanchuk and Peter Leko square off in a 12-game rapid match. That should be a lot of fun, and you can read more about it on the official site.

Here's the top 20, fresh off the presses and including the Mexico City world championship.

1. Anand 2801
2. Ivanchuk 2787
3. Kramnik 2785
4. Topalov 2769
5. Leko 2755
6. Morozevich 2755
7. Mamedyarov 2752
8. Radjabov 2742
9. Aronian 2741
10. Shirov 2739
11. Gelfand 2736
12. Svidler 2732
13. Adams 2729
14. Kamsky 2724
15. Alekseev 2716
16. Grischuk 2715
17. Carlsen 2714
18. Akopian 2713
19. Jakovenko 2710
20. J. Polgar 2708

And the top ten women:

1. J. Polgar 2708
2. Koneru 2606
3. Cramling 2531
4. Zhu Chen 2531
5. Zhao Xue 2530
6. Kosteniuk 2515
7. Sebag 2509
8. Hou Yifan 2502
9. Chiburdanidze 2500
10. T. Kosintseva 2492

Comments: First, it's great to see Anand hit the 2800 plateau for a second time (he was 2803 on the April 2006 list), achieving for the first time in his career and only the second time in history the trifecta of being world champion, #1 on the rating list, and a 2800+ rating. Second, Ivanchuk's achievement is tremendous as well, and I hope he's able to par