Adarsh in Iceland, Round 4

A draw with Black against Turkish Grandmaster Baris Esen is a perfectly acceptable result for the IM-norm hunter.  (Realistically, Adarsh may have little hope in this event even though he's currently +1 against GMs: he's played two players below 1800, and he even dropped half a point.)  But the quality of play is what counts....

The Slav Triangle morphs into the QGD Exchange, and White gets nowhere.

Today's game score courtesy of The Week in Chess.

Not all opposite-color bishop endings are drawn

Boris Gelfand just won a textbook ending against Hikaru Nakamura in the first round of the Grand Prix event in London:

On the queenside, Black's bishop and two pawns paralyze White's four pawns with a dark square blockade. On the kingside, Black's two connected passers are mobile, and the Black king, bishop, and pawns coordinate with each other.. (Nakamura was even up a meaningless pawn for several moves.)  So the final position is an easy win, even for you and me.  Opposite-color bishop endings are funny that way: you can be two pawns up and it's a dead draw, or material is equal and somebody's completely winning.

I should add that I followed this game live from the new website of The Week in Chess.

P.S. Alejandro Ramirez annotates this game on ChessBase.

Chess Life Online covered yesterday's opening ceremonies.

USA 2 1/2 - Russia 1 1/2

Russia vs USA Round 9
Photo © http://chesstv.com

Congratulations to US coach Yury Shulman, to John Donalson, and the whole team!  Get the story at Chess Lilfe Online; also see Mark Crowther's recap at The Week in Chess.

Hikaru Nakamura moved to number 4 in the world with this win over former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik:

Gata Kamsky kept pressing in a position that seemed hopelessly drawn. With no pawns on the baord, rook and bishop versus rook is a theoretical draw, but it's difficult for grandmasters to defend if they can't reach one of the standard defensive setups.

Gata makes Magnus say a bad word

Kamsky plays brilliantly in the opening, and the frustrated Carlsen admits he [messed] up, using a Norwegian dialect phrase not suitable for work. Cover your ears, children.

But Magnus buckles down and holds the draw: check it out at The Week in Chess. (Postscript 1/30/2012: GM Ian Rogers hits the highlights of this game in his article for Chess Life Online.)


Nakamura beats Van Wely and moves to number six in the world. Aronian beats Gelfand with Black, and will win Wijk aan Zee tomorrow if he can draw Radjabov with the White pieces.

Nakamura leads Reggio Emilia

...and is currently #5 in the world on the "live" list!

The gap between the top four and the closely bunched pack at 5 through 10 is substantial, but Hikaru is making progress.



 Mark Crowther reports on today's wild Nakamura-Ivanchuk game.

London Chess Classic underway

Chicago Blaze manager Daniel Parmet is working the event, and Illinois Chess Association President Tom Sprandel is in London.  Maybe we can get some inside info....

The nine grandmasters (including the world's top four: Carlsen, Anand, Aronian, Kramnik) played a fun exhibition game against "the rest of the world" on Twitter.  The geniuses won easily, but they missed an amazing combination (checkmate or win of queen) in the position below:

Black to play and win quickly

Follow this link for the answer, the entertaining game, and the notes.

Follow Round 1 (right now!) at the official site, WhyChess, The Week in Chess, or your favorite paid provider. 

Carlsen wins Bilboa in blitz playoff

...and Hikaru Nakamura, bizarre round nine loss notwithstanding, takes third on tiebreaks.  A deserved win for Carlsen (who beat the red-hot Ivanchuk twice in regulation play) and a bittersweet step forward for Nakamura.

Coverage in the usual places....

ChessBase 

ChessVibes

WhyChess (all games available via drop-down box)

The Week in Chess

Breakfast tomorrow: World Cup round 4

Peter Svidler leads Alexander Grisckuk 2-1 for the World Cup title.  Svidler has White and the two Russians are friends: a quick draw is not out of the realm of possibility.  Both players have already secured a slot as one of the eight candidates for the next world championship.

Vassily Ivanchuk leads Ruslan Ponomariov 2-1 in the match for third place.  To me, the Ukranian matchup is more fascinating: Ivanchuk has not been a Candidate in the classical cycle for twenty (!!) years, and in 2002, he lost a match to the teenaged Ponomariov for the pre-unification "FIDE World Championship" title.  The winner automatically qualifies for the 2013 Candidates, while the loser is very unlikely to earn an invitation.  Ponomariov managed to apply some pressure in today's game, but never came close to converting a pawn-up endgame.

Catch up on previous rounds at The Week in Chess, and follow the pre-dawn action at the official site!

Mild disappointment for Nakamura in Bazna

I can't pretend to care about tiebreaks in a round-robin: Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin tied for first in Bazna with impressive 6½-3½ scores.  Hikaru Nakamura lost to Vassily Ivanchuk in the last round, and dropped into a third-place tie with Teimour Radjabov, each with 4½-5½.

Story and games at The Week in Chess.  Check out Ivanchuk's postmortem interview on ChessVibes:

TWIC is back up

Grave of the greatest attacking genius (no, not Tal) ever?

Photo © Alex McFarlane.

More Candidates quarterfinals coverage at The Week in Chess.

Kramnik-Radjabov press conference

As you may have read on ChessBase, at one point in the Kramnik-Radjabov tiebreaks, there was a moment when Radjabov was literally seconds away from winning the Candidates quarterfinal match: all he had to do was draw a tricky (but objectively drawn) rook plus opposite-color bishop ending.  After move sixty, there was a clock malfunction, and the arbiters took thirteen minutes (!!) to restart the blitz game.  Kramnik managed to win and force yet another two-game blitz tiebreaker, which he also won, and with it, the match.

Interview here: congratulations to Teimour Radjabov for acting in such a sporting fashion after such a heartbreaking turn of events.

Incidentally, interest in the match was so high (and English-language real-time coverage so wanting) that The Week in Chess crashed: the TWIC live site is still offline.

Korchnoi at 80

 Age is just a number: Korchnoi beat Fabiano Caruana just a couple months ago!

Coverage at ChessBase and ChessVibes.

Carlsen-Nakamura live commentary

The game just started! I'm listening to Alex Yermolinsky on ICC. You can follow for free at Chess in Translation and The Week in Chess, among other places.

Ivanchuk beats Nakamura in Cap d'Agde finals

Two King's Gambits!  Although Ivanchuk tricked Nakamura into a good-vs.-bad-bishop ending in the first game, Nakamura's anti-King's Gambit system is utterly respectable and fun!

1.e4 e5 2.f4 Nc6 3.Nf3 f5!?

Coverage at The Week in Chess (games are in drop-down box above the board) and Europe-Echecs.

Linares midpoint

Topalov is +2 after beating Grischuk today; nobody else is above breakeven.  Details at TWIC.

Anish Giri annotates the epic Topalov-Grischuk battle on ChessBase.

Malcolm Pein annotates Nakamura-Gelfand

Hikaru Nakamura

© John Saunders

At The Week in Chess.

Savchenko-Shulman live

...at The Week in Chess. Yury trails 3-2; he's got to win the game being played right now to avoid elimination. UPDATE: Still in progress (this is a wild one! and Yury has real chances to win...)