benefit tournaments Saturday day and Saturday night!

During the day Saturday, February 6, 2010, the Illinois Chess Association is holding benefit tournaments (open and scholastic) to benefit the Chicago Blaze and the ICA Warren Junior Program.

Fundraiser details here! Registration ends at 9 a.m.: please arrive a half-hour early!

Saturday night, it's the 2010 Illinois Blitz Championship!! Registration ends at 6 p.m.: please arrive a half-hour early! Both events are at the Student Union of Northeastern Illinois University, close to both the Edens and the Kennedy. You'll find detailed directions here.


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And here's a campus map.

Parking is free if you park on the 3rd or 4th floor of the campus parking garage only. If you can't make it on Saturday (as I write, that's tomorrow!) please consider making donations to both these worthy causes. You can donate to the Chicago Blaze on their homepage. Glenn Panner tells you why you should.

To donate to the Warren Junior Program, make checks payable to: Illinois Chess Association, Inc. and mail them to:

ICA Warren Junior Program 

Carl Dolson, ICA Treasurer 

6021 N Wickwood Rd 

Peoria, IL 61614

Do you prefer credit cards?  I'll put up a link to the ICA's PayPal address shortly.

Donations to the Warren Junior Program may be tax-deductible; donations to the Chicago Blaze won't be deductible in the general case.  As always, ask your tax advisor.

This tax advisor will make a donation in lieu of attending the daytime fundraiser.  But you'll see me there tomorrow night, pushing pawns at the blitz!

Karsten Müller annotates Shirov-Kramnik

Shirov-Kramnik, Corus 2010

White to play

You can read and play through GM Müller's explanations at ChessBase.  Shirov may only have taken second place, but he played the most spectacular chess at Wijk aan Zee.  Don't try to understand all the moves: just enjoy the fireworks!

Oh yes, this is supposedly a Chicago chess blog....

What Your Body's Thinking About

 From ChessVibes.

Cool podcast - St. Louis Chess Club

The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis recently started regular iTunes podcasts, available here. The January 26th podcast is an interview with IM John Donaldson, captain of the silver medalist US team at the World Team Championships.

Spassky at Gibraltar

This video is a whopping five hours long! To go directly to the spot where former World Champion Boris Spassky begins analyzing with GM Stuart Conquest, skip directly to 3:35 (that's 3 hours and 35 minutes remaining). Hat tip to ChessBase.

Watch live streaming video from gibraltarchess at livestream.com

Fire on Board

If you're rated at least 1600 and haven't already read Fire On Board: Shirov's Best Games, please do yourself a favor and buy a copy. Even though Shirov has reached the ripe old age of 37, he hasn't lost his touch. His last round game against Dominguez (agreed drawn in a crazy time scramble) was pure genius.

Shirov-Dominguez, Corus 2010

After 21...h6; White to move

Black has the two bishops, the small pawn center (e6 and d6) that Sicilian players love, and a natural plan of attacking White's king.  White has a monster pawn on g6 and the semi-open h-file, and it's his move: every move is vital in these opposite-side castling positions.

White's problem is that a direct sacrifice like 22.Rxh6?! gxh6 23.Qxh6 (threatening mate on h7) fails to 23...Bc8).  

White can simply grab the d-pawn, but Rybka tells me that Black gets good activity for the pawn after 22.Qxd6 Qxd6 23.Rxd6 b4.  It's possible that this is objectively the best line:--as of today, who knows?

So what move did Shirov find?

And if you can't stand the suspense, the full game is here.

tactics from Corus: So-Giri

15-year-old Anish Giri's mother is Russian, his father is from Nepal, so naturally he plays for the Dutch federation.  He'll be playing in the A section of Corus next year!

Anish Giri: winner of the Corus B section

Here's the crucial position from Giri's game against another prodigy, Wesley So of the Phillipines:

So-Giri, Corus 2010

White to play: what's the best move?

A) 36.Ne2  B) 36.Qxd1 C.) 36.Qxd4 D) 36.Ra2

White is up two bishops (!) for a bunch of pawns.  But getting mated would be bad.  

Hint: one move probably wins, one move probably draws, one move definitely draws, and one move definitely loses.

Carlsen wins Corus

Carlsen takes a stroll

Here's the report from the organizers' fabulous website.  And US Chess Online has a nice report up, too.

Carlsen overextended against fellow teenager Fabiano Caruana (who plays for Italy, but is also a US citizen).  He bailed out and drew a very ugly knight ending with accurate defense.  Caruana's -2 is an excellent début in a tournament of this caliber.  We now expect Magnus to win every event.

Alexei Shirov played another amazing attacking game against Lenier Dominguez of Cuba.  With two seconds left for each player, Dominguez offered a draw in a position where he was a piece up, yet losing by force by a combination neither player had time to see.  So with another minute on the clock, Shirov would have been the co-winner.  Great tournament for Shirov!

Vladimir Kramnik got nowhere against Karjakin: he too had a great event.

Vishy Anand (who seemed to be playing in Petrosianesque safety-first mode for much of the event) has to be somewhat disappointed with his undefeated +2 score.  But if you're Veselin Topalov looking for a weakness in Anand's game, you've got to be worried about facing Anand in match play.

Hikaru Nakamura beat Sergey Tiviakov demonstrated the power of the two bishops in a beautiful textbook ending (two bishops vs. bishop and knight): his +2 shows he has the potential to crack the top ten very soon.  (Once today's games are rated, Nakamura should move to #18 on the live rating list.)

Genius Vishy

Anand has been playing a brilliant game against Kramnik, going on right now.

UPDATE:  Anand won in style.

Post-mortem comments by the modest genius

GM Rogers - live analysis

I have to miss the end of Shirov-Kramnik.  You don't. 

Lucky Vishy

Anand analyzes his win against Shirov.

P.S.  GM Ian Rogers explains on Chess Life Online.  

What's the best move?

Anand-Shirov, Corus 2010

White to play

Kramnik as standup comedian

Oh yes, Corus. (I do have to work for a living.)

“At the start of the game Magnus just sat there with his eyes closed to the point where I wondered whether he’d fallen asleep and I should wake him up,” Kramnik told reporters afterwards. “But, seriously, my guess is that Gary (Kasparov) called him beforehand and told him he should try 1. e4. In the end he came up with 1. d4, which was the wrong choice, I think. He should have avoided the Catalan, a line I have a great score with, no matter whether I play white or black.”

Too bad there isn't a live ratings list for trash-talking.   But Kramnik backing up his words: he's now clear #3 in the world, only one win away from (re-)breaking the 2800 barrier.  Here's his win with Black against Carlsen.

Would Kramnik-Carlsen be a more interesting match than Topalov-Anand?

not-so-artificial intelligence

More on the Kasparov NYRB piece here at the Daily Dirt.  (Corrected link.)

P.S.   There was a feature on NPR this morning based on this WSJ article (subscription required?).  For "emotional" (re chocolate cake), substitute "intuitive" (re chess intuition).

Corus round 8

Not a good day for Nakamura. But it takes courage to play the Leningrad Dutch when your opponent (Kramnik) is expecting the Leningrad: here's Kramnik's analysis.

Tournament leader Shirov (+4) has five very tough games to play, and Nakamura (+2) is only half a point behind Kramnik and Carlsen (+3).  It's quite possible that +4 will be enough to win: Nakamura can realistically still get there.  +5 would be quite a tall order for Nakamura, but given his recent form and his remaining games, it's achievable. 

Round 8 report.

how we decide in chess

From a neuroscience blog!

Can working with computers improve our intuition? Interesting reading (especially in conjunction with Kasparov's NYRB piece); interesting comments. (via Andrew Sullivan)

Parenthetically, note that Carlsen's career is generating considerable attention from non-chessplayers.

P.S.  The blogger, Jonah Lehrer, was on Terry Gross's Fresh Air last Friday.  His new book is How We Decide.  And if you haven't read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, you really should: at least one chapter is of particular interest to chess players.

Boris Spassky - 2008 interview

ChessVibes daily updates

The daily updates are featured on the main Corus page, and also at chessvibes.com.

Kasparov waxes philosophical

...in the forthcoming New York Review of Books:

There is little doubt that different people are blessed with different amounts of cognitive gifts such as long-term memory and the visuospatial skills chess players are said to employ. One of the reasons chess is an "unparalleled laboratory" and a "unique nexus" is that it demands high performance from so many of the brain's functions. Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software.

Online openings tree from Chess Assistant

I did not know this existed: very cool resource for learning chess openings!  Especially for those on a budget....