The Chess Mind

At the Olympics in Dresden, we entered the round with two teams enjoying perfect 8-0 scores (2 points for a team win, 1 for a draw), Russia and the host country's (Germany's) A-team. They played and the result was four draws and a tied match. Morozevich pressed hard with an extra pawn against Gustafsson, but couldn't finish him off. So they're both 9-1 now, and have been caught by four other teams:

1. Ukraine: They beat Hungary 2.5-1.5; notable games include Karjakin's convincingly outplaying Polgar on board 2, and a real surprise on board 1: Ivanchuk beat Leko in a rook and bishop vs. rook ending. That a grandmaster could lose such an ending isn't that surprising - it happens all the time. But I wouldn't have thought a player of Leko's caliber and work ethic would fall susceptible. There were two big factors going against him, however. The first is the very short FIDE time control, and the second was that he started the endgame in a precarious position. Often the defender's king is reasonably centralized, and the strong side has to spend 20 moves or more driving it to an edge; meanwhile, the defender sets up one of the standard drawing ideas like Cochrane or the 2nd Rank Defense. Neither was available here - Leko started with his king cut off on g1, and lost very quickly.

2. England: They defeated Italy 2.5-1.5, but Caruana (send him back!) beat Adams on board 1.

3. Armenia: They beat a tough Dutch team, also by a 2.5-1.5 margin.

4. Azerbaijan: The prodigy factory held Magnus Carlsen to a draw on board 1 and dominated overall, beating Norway 3-1.

Tomorrow is a rest day, and on Wednesday we'll have these pairings for 9-1 teams:

Russia - England
Ukraine - Germany
Azerbaijan - Armenia

As for the U.S. team, they played a very weak team from Hong Kong (top board 2301; fourth board 1655!) and won 4-0; they now have a 7-3 score.

Now on to my ongoing event, the 17th North American FIDE Invitational. I won against organizer/director Sevan Muradian, keeping my precarious norm hopes alive for another round. It wasn't exactly scintillating, but at this stage the aim is to succeed, not to score style points. My opponent played the Londullon System, which puts Black in a bit of a dilemma: what does he do if he wants to win? I tried to walk a balance - take enough chances to create some imbalances, but to keep things dull enough that it wouldn't be too easy for him to use those imbalances. I'm not sure how successful I was, but my main achievement was to get him to burn huge amounts of time on the clock.

The game had a rather amazing ending, as Muradian sent his king on a daring raid all the way up the board into the heart of my position. It was probably okay too, but I had a terribly hard time believing he could get away with it even as I couldn't find a simple way to punish him. So here too I followed the basic strategy outlined above: I tried to arrange my position so that once his king was in, it would be stuck there and fairly easy for him to self-destruct, and thanks to his time shortage that's what happened.

In other norm action: Sergio Morales's perfect score came to a crashing end, as he was very convincingly outplayed by Angelo Young. Young's indirect way of reaching a Catalan proved very effective against Morales, who was clearly unfamiliar with the niceties of that particular approach. He's now 4-1, and although he gets GM Antonio next round, his norm chances aren't too bad. Even if he loses to Antonio, he's a favorite against Muradian and Inumerable. If those games play to rating, then he'll only need a draw in his remaining game, with Igor Tsyganov - who is now 4-0 (he has to make up his game with the late-arriving Antonio).

Time to rest now; tomorrow, I have White against Florencio Inumerable.