Archive for May, 2009

He had at least joint victory after the third day. Ukraine’s top GM Vassily Ivanchuk won the first game on day four, with the black pieces in just 28 moves. The second game lasted 56 moves and ended in a draw for the final 5.5-2.5 victory. Ivanchuk’s performance was close to 2800, Navara played about 50 points below his nominal rating (for tournament chess). Illustrated report.

GM Surya Shekhar Ganguly of India and Zhang Xiaowen of China won the Asian Open and Women’s Championships 2009, respectively, in Subic Bay Freeport Zone in northern Philippines. A total of $50,000 was at stake in the Open and $15,000 in the Women’s Championships, from FIDE and the National Chess Federation of the Philippines (NCFP). Big pictorial report.

After trailing 1:3 from their first four games Czech GM David Navara came out fighting in round five, dominating his opponent for most of the game and then playing a nice ending to take the full point. In game six Vassily Ivanchuk fought back, outplaying his opponent to maintain his commanding lead. The President of the Czech Republic Václav Klaus attended the event. Pictorial report.

Mihail Marin is an author who provides top-class contributions for
every issue of ChessBase Magazine. One of his specialties is the Modern
Benoni, for which he wrote three articles in CBMs 123 to 125. Recently he got the chance to put his theoretical knowledge to practice – in the Open in Sardinia, against Russian grandmaster Igor Naumkin. Commenting
on 10…Nbd7 Marin writes: “I had never played this before, but I had written
two articles about it. So preparing for the game had been
quite simple.” Here you can see Marin’s short notes (the game will be
annotated in detail in CBM 131):
Annotated game Naumkin-Marin.

Bulgarian chess trainer Valeri Lilov, rated 2411, has a weekly show on Playchess.com. On Mondays at 20:00h CEST (7 p.m. London, 2 p.m. New York) he presents practical chess problems and interesting themes based on games taken from recent super-tournaments. This time he will focus on the initiative, with live audio commentary. Take a look, it’s free!

Upcoming Events at the Kenilworth Chess Club :

NM Mark Kernighan won the 12-player, Kenilworth G/15 last night. Glen Hart, coming off a fine, =4th result at the U.S. Amateur East, finished in 2nd place.  Greg Tomkovich & Mike Wojcio tied for 3rd.

There is an article at the USCF website by Steve Ferrero about Sandi Hutama taking the 66th annual US Amateur Championship East title in Somerset, NJ. The crosstable is also up and shows how Hutama dominated the field with 5.5 out of 6. Jim West has posted a selection of Steve’s excellent photos from the event (note to Jim: fix the blog template; scrolling is a pain.) Diamondback also has shots of the prize winners. A record 220 players participated in this Heritage Event.

When did we see something like this before: the Prime Minister of a country attends a chess match and stays to listen to GM commentary? Day two of the rapid match in Prague brought a similar result to day one: David Navara was not able to win his white game and lost with black against Vassily Ivanchuk, who has been playing top events non-stop for months. Big pictorial report.

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ChessBase points us to two trailers on YouTube for new films about the late Bobby Fischer: Me and Bobby Fischer (see above) and Bobby Fischer Live (embedding disabled). The first is a disturbing but very interesting documentary focused on Fischer’s life after his arrest in Japan and extradition to Iceland. The second is an even more disturbing — for chessplayers anyway — docudrama about Fischer’s life that focuses on the roots of his dementia in childhood. Each tries to extend the story of the 1972 World Championship match in different directions, forward and back in time, to the endgame and the opening. My impression is that the documentary “Me and Bobby Fischer” holds some promise of adding new dimensions to the Fischer saga by depicting his time in Iceland, which is not captured by previous documentaries that I know. But I think that the morbidly melodramatic “Bobby Fischer Live” will simply drive chessplayers bonkers with inaccuracies and chessic blunders. Any chess player will see several problems in the trailer alone, beginning with the scene showing a teenage Fischer (already a rising master cum IM) reading Tarrasch’s The Game of Chess — while having to use a board no less!

Ultimately, I don’t think the rather chaotic and incomprehensible story of Fischer’s opening days and sad endgame can ever be as interesting as the perfectly structured real-life story of Fischer’s middlegame full of miraculous triumph and mystery — his rise to 1972 stardom and Garbo-like disappearance — a story that is beautifully, mythicaly, and touchingly narrated in young Josh’s voice in the black and white archival vignettes of Searching for Bobby Fischer (much of which is on YouTube), so that one wishes someone would just string those moments together as a stand-alone video. That’s why I had been excited to hear that the book Bobby Fischer Goes to War, which offers a very well dramatized and well researched account of the events surrounding the 1972 match, was optioned by Universal Pictures, and that they had hired director Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland) to film it. But the latest reports suggest that the project has been shelved due to the economic crisis.

Among the best Fischer films I have seen are “The Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer” (portions of which can be viewed on YouTube) and the excellent British documentary “Fischer vs. Spassky” (all of which appears to be available on YouTube). Both do a fairly good job of telling the story of the 1972 match through archival footage and interviews with figures of the time, including the very likable Boris Spassky. But it would be nice to see Fischer’s story get the full Hollywood treatment.

There is some hope that Madman Genius: Bobby Fischer Found, to be directed by Liz Garbus for HBO, will offer something along these lines. According to the website:

Madman Genius will chronicle the bizarre and tragic life of an American hero turned outlaw, chess champion Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s rise and fall echoed the demise of the Cold War World Order; without the black and white of the chessboard reflected in the ‘real’ world, Fischer, arguably the greatest chess player of all time, went insane. Novelistic in its story-telling, the film will chronicle the spectacular rise and fall of an American icon.

Fischer’s story continues to fascinate us and I am sure that there will be a string of future films about him. However, it appears we will still have to wait for this incredible true story to receive the cinematic rendering that it deserves.

Kenilworth G/15
Thursday, May 28th
8:30 p.m.

4-SS.
Non-rated.
Free entry.
No prizes.

The TD has the option of adding a 2 or 3 second delay to the time control.

I suddenly remembered today that June 1 is the postmark deadline for submissions to the Chess Journalists of America’s annual awards. This year they have simplified the “best blog” category by simply inviting all websites and then they will sort them based on genre:

9. Best Chess Website: Open to news sites, “blogs,” state websites, and so on. Special award given to the best example of each type of website.

I’ll be entering a few of my favorite blogs, so let me know if you plan on submitting yourself.

An eight-game rapid match between the best Czech grandmaster David Navara and the top Ukrainian Vassily Ivanchuk is taking place from May 27th to 31st 2009 at the Best Western Kampa Hotel in Prague. The first game was drawn, in the second Ivanchuk scored to take the lead. You can watch the games live on the official site, on Playchess.com or our Flash broadcast. Day one report.

Vassily Ivanchuk rushes as
ever from tournament to tournament, but at the moment he is somewhat out of
luck. In Sofia the Ukrainian was a tragic figure in several games. One such was
fought under the banner of “Liquidating to pawn endings”, which by the way is
also a subject discussed by Karsten Müller in

Chess Base Magazine 130 (which appears in the first half of June). In the
position in the diagram, Ivanchuk wanted to make the transition to just such an
ending with 44.Bxg5. Hamburg endgame expert Karsten Müller will explain to you
why that was not such a good idea…
Ivanchuk – Wang Yue