Archive for January 19th, 2010

Here are my unofficial, projected pairings for round 2 of the Kenilworth Championship :

A total of 445 players competed in the first qualifier for the FIDE Internet Championship, and tested the tournament software on the Playchess server to its limit. Everything went smoothly, and ten players have qualified for the final on January 30. The second qualifier is on Wednesday evening, the third on Saturday afternoon, with three more to follow. You can play in as many as you like.

Edgar Colle (1897–1932) was a Belgian chess who scored excellent results
in world-class tournaments. He died tragically at the age of 34, and is mainly remembered
for the Colle Opening System 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3. This, as Dennis Monokroussos
relates in this week’s Playchess lecture,
was not what he was able to play in a beautiful game against Ernst Grünfeld.
Be there at 9 p.m. EST.

Vassily Ivanchuk needed 26 moves to finish off Loek van Wely. Magnus Carlsen had Nigel Short on the ropes, but let the British GM escape with a draw. Kramnik was in trouble against Tiviakov but survived. Alexei Shirov scored his fourth win in succession, to lead with a 4.0/4 score and a 3483 performance. You’d think that was a record, but he will have to win the next five games to do that. Curious?

A complicated position arose during time trouble in
Tomashevsky (2708) vs Fier (2653). The pawn structure leaves us in no doubt:
it was a King’s Indian. The sacrifice 35…Bxg4 is on the cards, but
calculating through all the consequences accurately is hardly possible. What
does your intuition tell you?
A) The sacrifice is unsound. Black does not get sufficient compensation.
B) The sacrifice is playable. The position remains balanced.
C) 35…Bxg4 decides the game in Black’s favour.
The solution is here,
but first ponder over it with a larger version of the diagram.

He is a well-known firebrand in the chess world. In Wijk he is currently playing at a 3500 level. But Alexei Shirov is also a prolific chess teacher, and his ChessBase DVDs are amongst the most popular. Take for instance one of his latest, on the Philidor Defence, a surprise opening that can give rise to extreme open and closed positions. Shirov’s treatment is reviewed by a field biologist in the Yukon.

Last year Garry Kasparov visited Asia – for the first time since the Philippines Olympiad in 1992. He was in India and in Malaysia, where our reporter Edwin Lam did a Q&A with him. Kasparov spoke engagingly and candidly about Asia, his early career as a chess player, his protégé Magnus Carlsen and his Chess Foundation in America. Not a line of blah in this interview. Must read.