Archive for May 27th, 2009

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