The top seed and leader of the A-Group, Magnus Carlsen, drew his final game, as did his main contenders, which left the 19-year-old Norwegian the sole winner of the tournament. His FIDE ranking in the next list will most likely be the second highest in history. Kramnik and Shirov share 2nd-3rd. In the B-Group Anish Giri was first, ahead of top seed Naiditsch. Illustrated report.
Vishy Anand drew the first nine games of this event, and was to be found in the bottom half of the field. Today the World Champion beat his 2008 challenger Vladimir Kramnik, and after a win in round ten he is now in place four. After a draw against Peter Leko, Magnus Carlsen leads alone, half a point ahead of Kramnik and Shirov. The final round games begin an hour earlier tomorrow. Illustrated report.
The Chess Festival in Gibraltar has set up an innovative broadcast suite called Archie, costing £100,000, which provides live audio and video streaming from the playing venue. The host is GM Stuart Conquest, who yesterday invited the guest of honour Boris Spassky to join him “for a few minutes”. This turned into nearly three hours! Here are links and the solution to our Tannhäuser puzzle.
Vladimir Kramnik was in a bit of trouble with his Petroff against Alexei Shirov, but his defences held. Meanwhile his main rival in this tournament, Magnus Carlsen, kept up the pressure and his opponent Leinier Dominguez cracked in time trouble. With that he caught up with Kramnik on the scoreboard. Carlsen’s trainer Garry Kasparov showed us some lines in a previous game. Illustrated report.
You know him from the live commentary of Wijk aan Zee on Playchess. Grandmaster Daniel King has been a professional chess player for more than twenty years. At the same time he has distinguished himself as a coach, helping many of England‘s younger generation to achieve their potential. He can help you too, with his popular Power Play DVDs, of which there are now a dozen.
An Englishman, a Frenchman and a German – sounds like the start of a tired old music-hall joke – are in the lead with 3.0/3 points in the Masters group of the 8th Gibtelecom Chess Festival in Gibraltar. They are Michael Adams, Laurent Fressinet and Jan Gustafsson. Notworthy: Super-GM Ivan Cheparinov drew after a queen-sac brilliancy by Norwegian amateur Victor Havik. Round three report.
In chess we grapple with honesty, deceitfulness, bravery, aggression, fear, beauty, and creativity. Chess is an activity in which we deploy almost all our available cognitive resources; making it an ideal laboratory for investigation into the workings of the mind. That is the subject of a new book by an Argentinian biologist. Guess who reviewed it and guess whose 25-year-old photos we found.
Want to go to Moscow to play in the FIDE World Blitz qualifier in February?
Meet top international players over the board? With all expenses paid? You can
take a crack by participating in the Internet qualifiers on Playchess.com.
Thursday night at 20:00h CET (2 p.m. NY, 22:00h Moscow) is the last of six preliminaries.
What you need and how you can join is described
here.
Ten rounds have been played, three to go, with Thursday the rest day. That
give us a chance to catch up on the somewhat neglected lower groups. After our
recent Group B
pictorial we turn our attention to Group C, where six players are 20 years
old, five younger and three older. Dutch photographer Frits Agterdenbos has
sent us information and pictures for another lovely close-up gallery.
Seeing all these superstars at the Corus Tournament 2010, one can easily forget that also the C-group provides a wealth of highly interesting chess. For example this game, where White after Black’s last move 23…Bg7-f6 had to parry the attack on his queen. The strike
24.Rxf5 in your opinion leads to what?
A) advantage for White;
B) balanced play;
C) advantage for Black.
The solution is here,
but first ponder over it with a larger version of the diagram.
We had to wait ten rounds for this: World Champion Vishy Anand won his first game, with a little help from opponent Alexei Shirov. Magnus Carlsen surprised everyone in the world by playing the French Defence for the first time in a tournament game – and won it against his permanent rival Sergey Karjakin. Vladimir Kramnik drew and is in the sole lead. Illustrated report.
In round 7 in Wijk, Nigel Short was within touching distance of a win over Ex-World Champion Vladimir Kramnik. In the position in the diagram he had to
decide whether to exchange queens or to gobble up another pawn with Qxc5. Short chose
50.Qxc5, but after 50…Be6! 51.g4 Bxf5 52.Qxf5 Qb2+ the
activity of the black queen turned out to be the decisive drawing factor, despite Black being two pawns behind. But how should the minor piece ending after
50.Qxf6 gxf6
be evaluated? Can the extra pawn be made to tell in the struggle of knight against bishop? Yes, says GM Karsten Müller in ChessBase Magazine Online.
It was a fateful day – in all three groups. Vladimir Kramnik beat Magnus Carlsen after the latter blundered in terrible time trouble. Smeets, van Wely and Karjakin won their games, against Caruana, Leko and Nakamura. In Group B Anish Giri suffered his first loss against Anna Muzychuk, while Ray Robson also dropped the full point against his main rival Li Chao. Big pictorial report.
I just watched Vladimir Kramnik’s brilliant (open, transparent, objective, super-clear, etc.) presentation on his victory over Hikaru Nakamura in the Leningrad Dutch at Corus. You can view the game online at Chessgames.com, along with all of the games from the A-section of the tournament, where Kramnik has now moved into a tie for second with Magnus Carlsen (whom he plays today just beat moments ago) behind Alexey Shirov (whom he plays Friday). The other tournaments are also very interesting, with the B led by Anish Giri and C led by American Ray Robson.
Kramnik’s lecture on his game with Nakamura is really worth watching in full. Afterward he has some very nice things to say about Nakamura and the rest of the rising stars featured in the tournament and he predicts that Naka will be in the top ten and have a shot at the title by next year. I will be posting a tournament summary and webliography at the conclusion of the event and may include the other sections as well. I am predicting that Kramnik may just come from behind to win this thing.
Here are the pairings for Round 3 of the Kenilworth CC Championship :
Reinoso has withdrawn.
We have been following the first Super-GM event of the new decade very closely, but our attention and photographic efforts have been mainly concentrated on the A-Group. We should remember: Group B is a category 16 event with a rating average of 2629 – a top tournament anywhere else. To make amends Dutch photographer Frits Agterdenbos has sent us splendid close-up gallery.
He has two victories over Bobby Fischer, two against Tigran Petrosian and two against Mikhail Tal. Friðrik Ólafsson of Iceland earned his GM title 52 years ago. In 1978 he succeeded Max Euwe as President of FIDE, where he served until he was replaced by Florencio Campomanes in 1982. Ten days ago he played a brilliancy in a rapid chess event. Today Fridrik celebrates his 75th birthday.
We have heard many excuses before: illness, missed flight, or Oscar Wilde’s classy “I have to decline due to a subsequent engagement”. But this one is new: I cannot attend the Gibtel Masters because I am taking part in the opera Tannhäuser (by Richard Wagner). Still, even without the singing, dancing, soccer-playing GM the event has a great field. Preview.
At the end of last year Garry Kasparov sat down for an indepth interview with our Malaysian correspondent Edwin Lam Choong Wai. In part one he spoke about his early years and his collaboration with Magnus Carlsen. In the current session he talks about the first Karpov-Kasparov match, the anniversary exhibition in 2009, and his strength in simultaneous play. With a very nice example.
This could be an all-time world record: eight chess players from Brunei are planning to scale Mount Everest, as part of a project to help poor families in the Southeast Asian country. At the South Base Camp, 5,360 metres above sea level, the team will play a chess tournament. It is the highest in the federation’s history – could it be the highest level ever in the world? Brunei FM report.
This could be an all-time world record: eight chess players from Brunei are planning to scale Mount Everest as part of a project to help poor families in the Southeast Asian country. At the South Base Camp of Everest, 5,360 metres above sea level, the team will play a chess tournament. It is the highest the federation’s history – could it be the highest ever in the world? Brunei FM report.
Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don’t systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information. Carlsen, for instance, doesn’t compute the probabilities of winning if he moves his rook to the left rather than the right. Instead, experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors – all those mistakes they made in the past – have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can’t begin to explain. Neils Bohr said it best: an expert is “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right.
And this is why we shouldn’t be surprised that a chess prodigy raised on chess computer programs would be even more intuitive than traditional grandmasters. The software allows him to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.
Who was it who said that you have to lose thousands of chess games before you become an expert? Hat tip: Chess Vibes
Four white wins, one a fateful victory by Vladimir Kramnik over Hikaru Nakamura, left the former in equal 2nd/3rd place and demoted the latter to fourth. Alexei Shirov drew Magnus Carlsen to remain in the lead, by just half a point. Sergey Karjakin, Peter Leko and Fabiano Caruana won. In Group B Anish Giri scored again to lead the field by 1½ points. Big illustrated report from snow-covered Wijk.
…in the Marshall Attack was unleashed by Peter Leko in the 4th round in Wijk aan Zee versus Lenier Dominguez. Playing black, here he was facing the question of whether it would be advisable to immediately occupy the long diagonal with
23…Bc6 despite the riposte 24.d5, blocking it with tempo. What do you think?
A) this wins for White;
B) Black prevails;
C) the position eventually remains balanced.
The solution is here,
but first ponder over it with a larger version of the diagram.