Archive for October, 2009

The legendary eleventh World Champion died on January 17, 2008. A year and a half later new pictures have emerged that show Bobby Fischer after his win against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972, just before he went into reclusive hiding, initially in Pasadena, California. The pictures are from a visit to the Philippines, Tokyo, Hong Kong in 1973. Unusual and strangely moving.

You can get an impressive King Kong Deluxe Chess Set for $129.99 from Toynk. Based on the classic 1933 film, it contrasts an art deco city with a savage island (ruled by Kong as its King.) Daryl has great pictures from his collection (hope he didn’t buy it at $475.) I’d be tempted to invent a special chess variation to match the set (along the lines of Dracula Chess), in which the object of the game is for black to capture Ann Darrow and white to rescue her. Oh, wait, isn’t that Donkey Kong?

In 2006 she won the Women’s World Championship in Ekaterinburg, three months pregnant at the time. Now GM Xu Yuhua has won the FIDE Women Grand Prix in Nanjing, with 8.0/11 points and a 2619 performance. The final round leading to this victory was especially dramatic in a tournament that produced a sensationally low 33.3% draw average. Big final pictorial report.

Joe Renna has posted photos of the Kenilworth Chess Club in a very nice Picasa web album.

7 games from last night’s Garden State League matches have been uploaded. Links can be found on the league’s blog.

5 games from the recently concluded Sy Fish Memorial have been uploaded in java-replay and zipped PGN.

Sorry for the week-long delay. Getting Kenilworth’s teams organized & the GSCL site finished took priority.

Readers in Belgium, Sweden and the United States have posed questions to the
Editor of Chess Notes
about the accuracy of certain published game-scores involving such luminaries
as Bogoljubow, Fine, Réti and Tartakower. Some detective work was called for,
but would it prove possible in each case to piece together what really happened over the board?

In the final round, while we all were still asleep here in Europe, Magnus Carlsen scored a parting victory over Russian GM Dmitry Jakovenko. The other two games were drawn, which left the young Norwegian an unprecedented two and a half points ahead of the field. In the next rating list Carlsen will join the elite group (of just four players) who have crossed 2800. Full illustrated report.

Phenomenal 18-year-old Super-GM Magnus Carlsen finished the Nanjing Spring tournament (games at Chessgames) with a win to give him an unbelievable 8 / 10 score for the event, leading his nearest competitor, world number one Veselin Topalov, by 2.5 points. With the win, Carlsen broke 2800 on the Live Ratings List, making him one of the few in chess history to have done so. He is now less than 8 points back from Topalov and has an opportunity to surpass him before the year is out.

Next up is the Tal Memorial (Moscow, November 5-14, 2009) where he will have a much greater challenge, facing nearly the rest of the top 20 in the world: World Champion Viswanathan Anand, Levon Aronian (who is a fantastic tournament player), former champion Vladimir Kramnik, Peter Leko, Vassily Ivanchuk, Boris Gelfand, Alexander Morozevich, Peter Svidler, and Ruslan Ponomariov. If he passes that test, then he should have an easier time in the London Chess Classic (Kensington, December 8-15) facing Kramnik again, Hikaru Nakamura, Ni Hua, Nigel Short, Michael Adams, Luke McShane, and David Howell. There’s lots of good chess to look forward to in the coming months!

Below are links to annotations of Carlsen’s games from Rounds 6 – 10. I will try to add more as they appear. I previously posted links to annotations of Rounds 1 – 5.

Carlsen – Jakovenko, Round 10

• Dennis Monokroussos
• Peter Doggers
• Ljubomir Kavalek
• ChessBase Report
• GM Dimitrov

Radjabov – Carlsen, Round 9

• Peter Doggers
• ChessBase Report
• Miodrag Perunovic and Goran Urosevic

Carlsen – Wang Yue, Round 8

• Dennis Monokroussos
• Peter Doggers
• ChessBase Report
• Malcolm Pein
• Miodrag Perunovic and Goran Urosevic

Topalov – Carlsen, Round 7

• ChessBase Report
• Peter Doggers
• IM Wilfredo Sariego Figueredo
• Gaprindashvil, Azmaiparashvil, Ye Jiangchuan
• GM Dimitrov

Leko – Carlsen, Round 6

• ChessBase Report
• Peter Doggers
• GM Dimitrov

Please use the comments area below to alert me to any I have overlooked.

Last night, in Garden State Chess League action, The Kenilworth Karpovs beat the defending champion Kenilworth Kortchnois 2.5-1.5 while the Kenilworth Karpovs drew Staten Island 2-2.

Details on the league’s blog. Games, when posted, will also appear there.

The penultimate round of this Women’s event was the most important. Two of the ladies in the leading group, Xu Yuhua and Zhao Xue, were able to take full points against players in the middle of the table, while Georgian GM Nana Dzagnidze drew her “remote game” against chicken-pox stricken Batkhuyag Mungutuul. Xu is in the lead by half a point. Pictorial report with commentary.

… on enemy territory. That was the theme in this game where White, a piece down, after
49….Be8 (diagram) was facing a difficult choice. Which evaluation of the position is correct?
A) the first player must give perpetual check;
B) he decides the game with 50.Qe4;
C) he wins, but with another move.

The solution is here,
but first ponder over it with a larger diagram.

Magnus Carlsen drew the black side of a Grünfeld against Teimour Radjabov in the penultimate round to secure sole victory in this Super-GM event. Carlsen has 7.0/9 (= +5), two more than his nearest rival, and his performance so far is 2981. The other two games were also drawn, with all three showing good fighting spirit. Full illustrated report.

ChessCafe appears to have taken a week off for some redesign. The site still needs a bit of a make-over, but the content remains the best on the web and seems to have even gotten better (if that’s possible). Abby Marshall’s excellent new column “The Openings Explained” kicks off with a fantastic piece on the Tarrasch Defense (1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 c5), which is a great choice for the target audience of club and class players. Carsten Hansen’s “Checkpoint” reviews important books on the Dutch and King’s Indian (including Bologan’s, which is remarkably well written IMHO). And there is a promising new “Daily Chess News Links” feature (though the service they are using is not that great–it posts mostly PR and needs to broaden its definition of “news” to include blogs–so it hardly deserves to be at the top of the page.)

The content is so great, it’s just a shame the design does not make it more accessible. The main page has a new look, complete with author pictures, but whoever redesigned it was not exactly thinking “above the fold.” You still have to scroll down the page to find the latest Columns (they should be more prominently featured near the top) and you still have to go to the “Archives” to find the permanent links (though at least the “Archives” link is now more prominently displayed in the top navigation). Updated: However, I was wrong to claim in my first version of this review that they do not provide web-viewable chess games and notes, which are available in the excellent “Chess Cafe Theatre,” as a reader helpfully pointed out. That I overlooked this feature (which is pointed to by what appears to be an ad on the side of each article — and I am used to not noticing ads) suggests that it should be more prominently featured or redundantly mentioned at the opening or close of each article. However, it is definitely a great addition to the site, and you can also download a PGN file of previous columns (which is fantastic). So my criticisms do begin to sound very minor indeed. But it is only because I like this site so much that I offer them….

I dropped by the Kenilworth Chess Club a couple weeks back, where two players were discussing an amusing trap that begins 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Nd5!? I have since posted an article on this Sicilian Dragon Trap with 6.Nd5 (and you can download the PGN for your own analysis).

At first glance, this looks like the type of move that should get White in trouble. After all, moving the same piece twice in the opening is rarely good. But it has some bite, and I was intrigued enough (and interested enough in the Sicilian Dragon as Black) to look into it. As I suspected, with best play Black is doing fine, but White is not risking more than equality. Meanwhile, he does set a dastardly trap, because 6….Nxe4? (tempting in blitz) drops at least the Exchange. Can you see how?

At two in the morning she summoned the hotel doctor, who diagnosed chicken pox. Chief Arbiter Ignatius Leong decided that WGM Batkhuyag Mungutuul of Mongolia could continue playing, in an isolated room, with a face mask and sergical gloves. In the meantime Marie Sebag lost to Baira Kovanova and handed the lead over back to Nana Dzagnidze and Xu Yuhua. Pictorial report.

It was a splendid idea – why aren’t more people doing it? – a match
between a Nairobi chess club and a very strong Dutch team. The latter won 6-0,
but the former had the pleasure of playing Jan Timman and other great player.
All of this was conducted via the Internet on Playchess.com,
and cost a fraction of what a face-to-face would have entailed. Big pictorial report by Mehul Gohil.

After the comet-like start of Georgian GM Nana Dzagnidze a new star has risen in the Nanjing Women’s Grand Prix. With a win over former Women’s World Champion Zhu Chen it is now French GM Marie Sebag who is in the sole lead. She is followed by Dzagnidze and Chinese GM Xu Yuhua. Pictorial report with commentary by FM Geoffrey Borg.

The wait is over, the English language version of Fritz 12 is now available and shipping to our customers all over the world. It represents a complete rewrite of the famous Fritz interface. The program has been modernized to comply with Microsoft’s “Fluent UI” standard – anyone who knows Office 2007 will feel immediately at home in Fritz 12. Take a look.

Stoyko – Grasso, Hamilton Quads 2009
White to play. What is the winning plan?

FM Steve Stoyko showed me a nice game he played at the Hamilton Quads back in August. Though it offers some ideas on how to play the Colle-Zukertort, the game is chiefly of interest as an example of when “bishops of opposite color endings” can be won. You can play it over below or download the PGN file.

Related Links

• The Colle in Black and White
• A Fascinating Colle Game
• Ippolito and Bartell Win NJ Championship
  Features a nice Stoyko win with the Zuke.

The 2009 KCC Events Calendar has been updated to include our upcoming lectures and Garden State Chess League matches.

I came across this LED Chess Set from Cool Stuff Express for $89.99 and another from Hi-Tec Art for $39.99. I should have recognized that such products were inevitable when I read about how to make your own LED chess set (using an inexpensive set made of glass), as well as a “simple version” of the same concept that supposedly takes only four hours to build. Pretty cool for playing chess in the dark, if you have either the money or the time.

The Kenilworth Chess Club will be hosting 3 lectures this fall, all of which are geared toward chess improvement.

• On October 15th, FM Steve Stoyko will present “Evaluating Chess Positions, An Introduction”.
• On October 29th, NM Scott Massey will show us “How To Improve At Chess”.
• On December 3rd, NM Yaacov Norowitz will speak about “Color Complexes”.

The lectures will begin at 8:15 or 8:30 p.m. and the admission price for each is $5.00 per person. Non-members are welcome.

When he is not watching his charge, chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, on Playchess,
Garry Kasparov is talking to the media giants. CNN’s Becky Anderson discussed
chess, computers and Russian politics with him. "I started from a totally
lost position," says Kasparov on the last subject, "but the Russian
opposition still exists." Four and a half minute interview.

Mihail Marin’s opening articles are amongst the
most thorough that ChessBase Magazine has to offer. In CBM 128 the Romanian GM
investigated 3…d6 against the Giuoco Piano, a move which is aimed at
carrying out the fianchettto with …g6. In it he came to the conclusion, “that
3…d6 followed by …g6 is basically sound”. Now he has had occasion to employ
in praxis his own suggestion, where his opponent chose the most frequently adopted
plan with queenside castling. But you can see for yourself in
the annotated game Lupulescu-Marin or get the full contents of ChessBase Magazine 128 in the shop