The Daily Dirt Chess Blog

Radjabov and Polgar Move Up

It ain't easy being right all the time, let me tell you. Which is why I don't try it myself. But it was nice to see Radjabov and Polgar win in round six of the Biel GM Group after I mentioned I expected to see them make a move. Motylev found out why it's probably not a good idea to play 1.e4 against Polgar. In a 6.Bg5 Najdorf, the Hungarian made him pay for his pawn-picking on the kingside. Her second win moved Polgar up to +1 and the pack at 3.5/6 a full point behind Magnus Carlsen. Radjabov is also in that group after scoring his first win of the tournament. He played a nice full-court press against Avrukh. The Azerbaijani top seed played with a lot of patience before finally finishing with a flourish. Onischuk played a long, tough draw against Bu Xiangzhi and is also on +1. The novelty 14.Na2 is worth a glance.

Sasha Grischuk took an extra pawn into a rook endgame against Magnus Carlsen but was never really in danger of winning it. Or at least it will take someone more Speelman than I to show that he was if he was. Black has been doing fine in the line of the Semi-Slav played in Pelletier-van Wely. That was again the case here after some transpositional devices and a swapfest. The local hope couldn't make anything of his 3 vs 2 on the queenside and the Dutchman held easily. He's still bringing up the rear on -3, however.

Today is the last off day of the event. ChessBase has some pics and links including some interview notes with Polgar and Karpov, who is on the scene in Biel. If anyone could make sense of blatant favoritism in a world championship cycle it would be Karpov, but even he seems baffled by the Topalov situation! Anyway, the way Ivanchuk is playing these days do we have any volunteers to go to Mexico City and steal Svidler's laptop?

Carlsen Leads Biel

Magnus Carlsen is on track to improve his 2006 Biel result. Last year he finished equal 2-3 with Radjabov far behind Morozevich. But the Norwegian teen beat the winner twice and showed flashes of the tenacity that led to his breakout performance in Linares this year after two earlier rough supertournament showings. This year Carlsen is leading the Biel GM Group by a full point after five rounds with a 4/5 score. In round five he beat his co-leader, America's Alexander Onischuk, in an excellent effort. Onischuk gave up a pawn for compensation but never managed to get it back. When he tried it meant stepping into a permanent pin that led to resignation.

The other decisive game of the day was Bu Xiangzhi's win over Motylev. In an amusing sequence, Bu moved his queen five times in a row after poaching a pawn on a7. It went from b5-a6-a4-h4-d4 while Black moved just about every piece he had, and White had a plus! The move back to d4, with the threat of Qd6 that eventually won, was an alert pick-up. After the queen got to safety on h4 it takes some effort to play it right back into the middle of the black forces. The a-pawn was the righteous winner in the end.

The Chinese star was on the wrong side of another interesting queen adventure in the fourth round. It looks like a completely busted opening for Black, bordering on suicidal. But Black looks to be getting excellent compensation with the Bb7 and the open f-file. But Avrukh saw deeper and found a lovely way to extricate the lady tactically to win. Carlsen had a piece of good fortune against Motylev in the 4th. Carlsen was defending and Motylev, in his usual time trouble missed several knock-out blows. Then the Russian missed a lot more than that, hanging his bishop in mid-air and resigning. Horrible.

The Rodina has a chance for revenge Sunday as Grischuk takes white against Carlsen. Radjabov, the top seed, is holding with his King's Indian but is unable to score with white. I expect he'll make something happen in the final four rounds, but it's probably too late to catch Carlsen. They meet in the final round, Carlsen with white. Onischuk has white on Sunday against Bu Xiangzhi. Polgar has black against Motylev in what could be a wild one. Nobody has played 1.e4 against her yet.

Montreal Empresa Final Round

Two wins in a row have put top seed Vassily Ivanchuk in good shape to win yet another tournament this year. Going into today's final round, the Ukrainian leads the Montreal International by a half point thanks to wins over Bluvshtein and Miton in rounds seven and eight. He caught up Tiviakov when the Dutch champion's amazing run was ended by early leader Harikrishna in round eight. Tiviakov had won three in a row before that, but even more remarkably he has now played seven consecutive decisive games. He's now in a tie for 2-3 with Harikrishna with 5.5/8, a half-point back of Ivanchuk. Ivanchuk beat Miton with black with a pretty bishop sac preceded by an elegant knight wheel. That sets up today's Ivanchuk-Harikrishna battle nicely. Gata Kamsky hasn't been able to buy a win in the last four rounds and is still on +2 undefeated with five points. Nigel Short scraped himself off the sticky floor by beating Eljanov in round eight and now has an outside shot at making an IM norm. (He has just played the King's Gambit and sacrificed his queen against Bluvshtein, who has already lost four in a row.)

The moth-eaten grudge match between Short and Kamsky was drawn in round seven. For some reason Short was asked about the ugly mess around their candidates match thirteen years ago and for some reason he answered in detail. I suppose this being their first game since that 1994 encounter (5.5-1.5 Kamsky) is good enough reason to ask. This is actually the re-rehash since we blew some of the dust off this last year. Regardless of what it occasionally reflects, Short's candor is always welcome in a too often boring chess world. As for Gata, well, as the saying goes, not finishing last is the best reward.

Even if you don't want to read those bits, rockrobinoff's blog for the Montreal event is a must.

Update: Ivanchuk beats Harikrishna to storm to yet another tournament victory. He scored 7/9, winning his last three in a row. At this pace he's going to make the next rating list an interesting one. But keeping up a great pace has always been his problem. That and he hasn't been running up these numbers against top-10 players, much like how Morozevich would jump up to #4 and then flatline at Corus. Still, it's sad to see him not in Mexico City (he failed to qualify for the candidates in '05). Maybe the winner of the World Cup should play Ivanchuk.

Tiviakov failed to beat Charbonneau and finishes second. Harikrishna is third. Kamsky fell back into the horrible time management we saw at MTel and the Candidates and lost to Eljanov to finish at +1. Sutovsky started 0/3 but, always the fighter, battled back and finished on an even score after beating Miton in spectacular fashion. Short eventually lost a wonderfully romantic game against Bluvshtein and at 2/9 may head back to the dentist for some happy gas. An exciting event. The local heroes had satisfactorily painful performances and gained points.

Three Lead in Biel

The Biel GM group has been a balanced affair through the first three of its nine rounds. No one has more than a single win and only van Wely has managed to lose two out of three. The leaders with 2/3 are Carlsen, Onischuk, and Motylev. Top seed Radjabov has played three draws: two wildly complex King's Indian's with black and a brief draw with white against Bu Xiangzhi. Grischuk missed a knockout blow against him in the third round. 55.Rxf4 would have ended the game immediately. Despite that flaw, the game contained a steady flow of sensational ideas and earned the rare "a wonderful game!" honor from Kasparov. 37.e5! opening the b1-h7 diagonal; 43..g4 was an amazing concept in return.

There have been quite a few other interesting games despite the high ratio of draws. The computer points out a cute shot that might have saved Polgar a loss against Bu Xiangzhi. 22..Bxf2+! 23.Kxf2 Qc5+ 24.e3 Nxd2 25.Rxc5 Nxb3. An elegant combination of tactical themes. The game itself had its share as well. Bu Xiangzhi moved two pieces backwards to a2, strong both times.

Thursday was a rest day. Polgar-Radjabov should be a good one in Friday's round four.

Seven More to World Cup

I keep forgetting to post this. The Americas Continental Championship ended last week and sent seven players to this year's World Cup in Khanty Mansyisk, Russia. As feared, there was again a big playoff for the final two spots and it resulted in a few upsets. Several favorites and a few of the teen hopes were in the eight-player rapid (15'+10") playoff. The top seeds didn't make it. Nor did Leon Hoyos of Mexico or Emilio Corbova of Peru. (I believe they both got GM norms, however. For Leon Hoyos it was his last, which makes him the sixth Mexican GM ever, if you include Carlos Torre.) The two qualifiers were Peralta of Argentina and the unheralded Everaldo Matsuura of Brazil. They overshadowed their better-known compatriots Felgaer and Vescovi, respectively, with impressive 5/7 scores. Gulko, who made a late run in the main event, finished third in the tiebreaker.

The other five qualifiers were a little closer to the script, with the exception of Venezuelan IM Eduardo Iturrizaga. They are Granda Zuñiga, Ivanov, Akobian, and Lima. They all finished with 8/11. Kudos to my ICC Chess.FM homeboy Var Akobian. The 128-player World Cup is scheduled to begin on November 23. The updated regulations for qualification and more are here on the FIDE site. There are 20 rating qualifiers and they are already known since it's based on the average of the July 06 and January 07 rating lists. Have they been published anywhere? Topalov and Kramnik are already at the end of the cycle. The rest of the Mexico players are automatically in for some reason. All would be in by rating, so this takes seven spots away from qualifiers and takes them from the rating list.

After much laborious copying and tabling, here are the 20 rating qualifiers by my count. (If someone else already has this up somewhere, please don't tell me.) The Mexico players and Topalov are in italics. The rating list takes priority over qualifiers for the World Cup, so that's good news for anyone who may have missed the cut in their national or continental event by finishing behind anyone in bold type. Note that Kasimjanov and Malakhov are tied for the final rating spot. They go to two decimal places to break ties, info not publicly available. I only looked at the top 40 or so the Jan 07 list, so there's an off chance that someone who plummeted out of the top 40 from July 06 makes the top 29 on average.

It's a straight-up knock-out with two-game mini-matches with tiebreaks on the third day. The final match, which will determine the challenger for Kramnik or Topalov, is four games.

Biel 2007

The Biel GM tournament is always a highlight of the year, although this year's edition will have a hard time living up to last year's. Alexander Morozevich, last year's brilliant winner, has decided to prep for Mexico City (or something) instead of defending his title. This year it's a nine-round all-play-all instead of the double we've seen lately. The Swiss have put together a very interesting field that should provide plenty of fighting chess. Magnus Carlsen is in action -- last year he made an impression by beating Morozevich twice. The other players: Radjabov, J Polgar, van Wely, Onischuk, Motylev, Grischuk, Avrukh, Bu Xiangzhi (straight from Ottawa) and local boy Pelletier. There are rest days on the 26th and 30th and the final round is Aug. 2.

In yesterday's first round, Polgar got off to a good start by beating van Wely with black. Carlsen beat Bu Xiangzhi in an impressive oppo-bishop endgame I'm not at all sure White is supposed to win. The live games (link at the site each day) begin at 2pm local time; that's 12UTC, 8am EDT. Alexander Onischuk is continuing his impressive run of invitations. I can't remember the last time an American played in so many strong European invitationals in one year. He played an interesting exchange sac to get pressure against Radjabov's KID but it fizzled to an interesting draw. The two first-round winners are facing each other now in round two. Looks drawish.

Short Circuit in Montreal

Nigel Short may have more than a little very well-aged beef with Gata Kamsky, but it's not on the crosstable of the Montreal International. After four rounds of this category 16 (2650) ten-player all-play-all, Kamsky is one of the trio of leaders with 3/4, along with Eljanov and Ivanchuk. Meanwhile, Short is doing his best to make Pascal Charbonneau look like Genghis Khan. My fellow Brooklynite, still playing for Canada, has a half point so far, but he's being kept out of the cellar by Short, who has lost all four games. In other words, Short has the same score as Canadian chess legend Abe Yanofsky, and Yanofsky's dead. By the way, we need a term for losing four in a row. "Castling long" for three straight losses is pretty good. I'm sure we can do better than "castling really long." Baseball has the "golden sombrero" for striking out four times in one game, upgrading the universal "hat trick" for things that come in threes.

Thanks to the pounding received by Sutovsky, Charbonneau, and Short so far, we've had 65% decisive games. Those three players are the only ones with negative scores. Sutovsky has yet to play a draw. Canadian teen hope Mark Bluvshtein is having a great event despite being outrated by a few hundred points by some of the players. He's on +1 after winning the all-Canada battle with Charbonneau and drawing with several of the leaders. Sergei Tiviakov has been unusually frisky. Actually, it's nice to see some of these guys out from under the brutal pressure of the top ten at events like Corus. Kamsky, for example, is showing how devastatingly strong he is when he's not facing guys like Gelfand every day. He's won both his whites in powerful maneuvering games with touches of tactics that remind me of vintage Kamsky. Today's Ivanchuk-Kamsky battle should be a good one. Short tries to avoid having us come up with a term for losing five in a row against Sutovsky.

2007 US Women's Ch Finale

It's here already, the final round of the US Women's championship in Oklahoma. The ninth round begins at noon EDT, 11am local time. The leaders with 6/9 are Irina Krush and the relatively unknown Katerina Rohonyan, originally of Ukraine and now living in Baltimore. I recognized her name only from a win she had with my dear Accelerated Dragon a few years ago against Jennifer Shahade in the US Chess League. The USCF site has more on the event and the players.

The two players with six points and defending champ Anna Zatonskih with 5.5 are the big favorites to stay in the top three that qualifies for the FIDE women's world championship. In fact, only Zatonskih can be caught and that would require a loss to Vicary today combined with a win by Tuvshintugs or Battsetseg. That gives Krush and Rohonyan the freedom to play for tournament victory and the title today without worrying about qualification.

Been watching the games? There have been many of the tactical blowouts you'd expect at this level, but any nominations (unofficial of course) for the Chess Goddess brilliancy prize?

Update: BROOKLYN WINS!! IRINA KRUSH 2007 US WOMEN'S CHAMPION! CONGRATS! She won with black to take the title a half point ahead of Zatonskih and Rohonyan. More at the official site. Score one for the Ninja squad. Black Belt readers have been enjoying Irina's detailed and insightful annotations regularly this year. Let's hope her rates don't go up now.

Checkered Past

Professor Jonathan Schaeffer has finally mounted checkers up on his wall along with the moose, bear, and whatever else they mount on walls in Alberta. After nearly 20 years his famous checker champion program Chinook has broken the game down. As he points out in several items, this isn't a mathematical proof. It is a computational proof that shows through brute force analysis that the game is drawn with best play and that his program will never lose. The bottom of this ChessBase item links to some of the coverage.

I met Professor Schaeffer a few years ago at the Junior-Kasparov match (I was doing commentary and he was on the rules and appeal committee) and also greatly enjoyed his book on Chinook and its matches against checkers legend Marion Tinsley, "One Jump Ahead."

From the project website:

I did a brief email interview with Professor Schaeffer yesterday.

1) How close to your original and updated predictions for completion was this date? How much did the process change during this time, or was it more a question of adding more firepower to the basic process you came up with at the start?

In 1989 I was naive in estimating the amount of work needed to solve checkers. I was grossly underestimating the size of the problem for a long time. Not until we started making real progress at propagating proven values to positions near the start of the game (in late 2004) did I know for sure that we could solve checkers within a few years. At the time I thought it would take another 5-10 years. Now I was too pessimistic. It ended up taking 2.5 years more.

So much for my limited ability to make reliable predictions :(

2) Aren't the people quoted in some of the coverage as saying 2060 for solving chess being dunderheads and picking numbers out of thin air? Or is that actually based on a potential timeline of technological development? It sure ain't gonna happen by then by Moore's Law. From my understanding, mostly poached from Nunn, we'd need as many computers as there are atoms in the solar system working on it for a few [insert very long time here] to do it, the numbers are so big.

I have been asked many times when chess will be solved and I refuse to say anything other than it can't be done for a very long time unless there is a fundamentally new breakthrough. The computing models that we have today -- even if they are a billion times faster -- won't make a dent in chess. We need something *much* better. The answer might be quantum computing, but this technology is still in its infancy and remains unproven.

3) Since poker is a game of bluffing and calculated irrationality as much as it is one of odds and calculation, can a computer ever dream [sic?] of beating the best humans? Or will it reveal that those factors really aren't as important as we'd like to think?

Find out next week...

By an odd-coincidence, we have the First Man-Machine Poker Match next week. Two US pros are playing our software (the computer world champion) in a $50K event. We will be competitive, but I am not sure we are good enough to win yet. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machine/

4) Do you like to play checkers? Play at all anymore?

I never played checkers, except to test the program. Chess is my first love (ooops, besides my wife, that is). Checkers is a great game, but I know what it takes to master chess and I don't have the heart to repeat that process with checkers.

5) Thinking of writing a sequel to One Jump Ahead now? Great book.

I want to do a second edition. The publisher has given me the OK, but now I have to find the time.

8th Montreal Empresa Tournament

The beautiful city of Montreal is hosting the Empresa International, a strong ten-player round-robin that began yesterday. The top seeds are Ivanchuk and Kamsky, with Eljanov, Short, Harikrishna, Sutovsky, Tiviakov, Miton also there to roast local boys Bluvshtein and Charbonneau, who is dusting off his pawns. (Although I believe I can now claim Pascal for Brooklyn as soon as FIDE comes through on that Brooklyn federation application.) The event concludes on July 28th and the only free day is Saturday the 21st. There is a blitz tournament on the 29th.

The round one crosstable is being done manually or else they somehow managed to have three losses and only two wins in the first round. The games page and the results page sort that out. The results page also has some handy notes to each pairing about previous encounters. In round one, Miton, Eljanov, and Harikrishna were winners. Ivanchuk and Kamsky both drew with black. The elves have game replay, not sure if they are all live, too.

Many GMs are also playing in the Quebec Open that runs concurrently at the same Hilton Doubletree Hotel in Montreal.

Yanquis Lead in Cali

With 9 of 11 rounds played in the Continental Championship in Colombia, two Americans lead with impressive seven-point scores. Alexander Ivanov and Var Akobian have already played a quick draw against each other, so their pursuers will get a chance to take them down in round 10. But many of the players at the top will be happy with draws if they estimate their scores are enough to finish among the top seven who qualify to the World Cup. Right now there are eight players in the pack at 6.5. That includes everyone's favorite teenage runaway for love, Peru's Emilio Cordova. Another teen, Mexico's Manuel Leon Hoyos, is also there. Perhaps his impromptu seconding of Ivanchuk at Linares has given him a push. (For completism, and though I have nothing to say about him, Venezuela's Eduardo Iturrizaga is another teen in the 6.5 pack.) 12-year-old Jorge Cori of Peru has six. He beat GM Zapata in round eight.

Let's just hope there isn't a massive tiebreak for those World Cup spots again. Last time it was a blitz event in the wee hours and a total mess.

2007 US Women's Ch Underway

Heck, it might even be over by the time this post reaches the interwebs. That's how fast this event sprints by at two rounds a day. As previewed a few weeks ago (and a lively debate still continues), the Frank Berry-sponsored women's championship began yesterday in that renowned home of champions, Stillwater, Oklahoma. The tidy official site by arbiter Chris Bird is up here.

Brand new state, gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley, carrots and pertaters,
Pasture fer the cattle,
Spinach and termayters!

The nine-round all-play-all will be over on Friday. No one scored 2/2 on the first day and things are still up for grabs. Chouchanik Airapetian was the only player with 0/2, so we're rooting for her as an underdog and not just because she has a personality that could give you cavities. We also have some fillies in the race in that Irina Krush annotates for Black Belt, Liz Vicary occasionally demonstrates here that blog commentary can be both funny and cogent (and she wuz robbed at last year's blog awards), and defending champion Anna Zatonskih had one of our favorite wardrobe malfunctions in San Diego in 2006. And then there's Tuvshintugs, who hails from my native East Bay. The Oaktown in the house! Good luck to all!

And when we say
Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine,
Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K.

The live games are here. Round 3 is almost completely over. Krush won for the first time, yay. But she beat Vicary, boo. Zatonskih scored her second win, yay. But it sent Airapetian to 0/3, boo. The top seeds meet today in round four with Zatonskih having white against Olympiad teammate Krush. Buy your tickets and your vowels now for the round 8 all-Mongolian matchup between Tsagaan Battsetseg and Batchimeg Tuvshintugs. The top three players go to the next FIDE world championship and the winner of that has to defend her title in a match against Topalov.

Baby It's Bu

Canada's trade deficit with China just got a little worse as Bu Xiangzhi took clear first at the Canadian Open in Ottawa. He beat Milov in the final round -- with black no less -- to finish with an impressive 8/10, living up to his top seeding. 2-6th a half-point back were Short, Miton, Sandipan, Krnan, and Sambuev. The baffling pairing system did allow for the four leaders to face each other in the final round. Thanks to Deen Hergott for his hard work on the event site. Let's hope all the games make it to TWIC.

There have been a few items in the comments on the steady ascent of the Chinese players on the rating list, and of course their Olympiad successes are already well known. Bu Xiangzhi now looks set to break the 2700 mark after plateauing for a few years. There has been talk that the somewhat restrictive Chinese school could produce very strong players but not a breakout top-tenner. Bu was a prodigy, if an alarmingly tall and mustachioed one, but we've seen even the best kids hit slow patches. Bacrot reached the top ten for the first time only recently. Will Bu, now 22, make it to the top ten or will it be Wang Yue, who is rated ten points higher and is two years younger? Wang Hao, born in 1989, was getting a lot of attention a few years ago and just cracked the top ten. Or there's always Hou Yifan.

Atalik Leads in Ottawa

Turkey's Suat Atalik, no longer his native nation's top player now that Mikhail Gurevich has moved in, has taken over clear first in the Canadian Open after seven rounds with three to play. He beat young David Howell of England in a nice rook endgame. There are notes to that game and others at the blog linked above. A pack of five GMs trail Atalik's 6/7 score by a half-point. ChessBase has some pictures and comments from Nigel Short and also some details on the sponsorship, which does not include anything from the government.

Down south at the Continental Championship in Cali, they are less avant-garde in their pairing methods so the leaders are facing the leaders. After three rounds, five players have perfect scores, including a wayward Canadian: Vescovi, Spraggett, Rodriguez, Granda Zuñiga, and Argentine IM Lafuente. AR-GEN-TINA! I wore my camiseta albiceleste yesterday to celebrate Argentina's win over Mexico, but it works for Lafuente too. The massive pack at 2.5 includes Oswaldo Zambrana, Bolivia's first and only Grandmaster. I hadn't realized young Alexander Fier of Brazil had also received his GM title. But there's no way I'm rooting for any Brazilians before the Copa final on Sunday.

Continental Cali-ente

The fourth Americas Continental Championship is underway in Cali, Colombia. This is a qualifier for the 2007 KO World Cup in Khanty Mansyisk, Russia (where there will be a different type of snow), in November, and the winner of that plays either Topalov or Kramnik in a match for either the world championship or the right to play in the world championship match. It's been hard to find information on this event. I finally found this page in Spanish with most of the vitals. It's 11 rounds with no rest days, ending on July 20th. The top seven finishers go to the World Cup. Rapid games settle tiebreaks for the spots. First prize is $10,000.

According to a Colombian chess site the Mexican and Ecuadoran delegations arrived late, so they held the first round today at 8am instead of yesterday as scheduled. But even if he was Yawn Ehlvest instead of Jaan, the top seed won, as did most of the favorites. Standings and other info here.

This last chance (?) to qualify for the World Cup attracted quite a few yanquis to Cali, including World Open champion Var Akobian. Other top seeds include Peru's Granda Zuñiga, Brazil's Vescovi, and Canadian veteran Kevin Spraggett. Speaking of veterans, Boris Gulko is still on the trail of the world championship. I was surprised not to see the name of Hikaru Nakamura on the list of players. He didn't make it in from the US championship, so is there another way for him to get into Khanty Mansyisk? He didn't exactly enjoy his trip there in 2005, when he was upset in the first round by the misunderestimated Ganguly.

Oh. Canada.

So much earnest labor is going into the confusion of sites covering the Canadian Open in Ottawa that we really must pay more attention. The overview and schedule are at this Canadian chess site. There's a fun learn-as-you-go blog to cover the event, and that links to some live and downloadable games. Some of the top games don't appear when both players decline to use the Monroi device. I hope they are getting all the scores by normal means for archival purposes. Results and standings are found yet elsewhere. That's where we find the 1700-rated teenager Dalia Kagramanov in a tie for 1st-12th with eleven Grandmasters after five rounds thanks to a skillfully played swiss gambit: winning by forfeit in the first round, losing in the second, and then winning three in a row against decidedly untitled opponents. Enjoy it while it lasts, Dalia.

That big leading GM pack includes top seed Nigel Short [actually rated two points lower than Bu Xiangzhi] and the Borschtmaster General himself, Alex Yermolinsky. Bu Xiangzhi and Milov are on 3.5. The estimated prize fund is just $20,000, so they must have made considerable efforts to bring in so many heavyweights. (They can't be there just for the poutine.) This has been seen before at Canadian opens, something to do with state sponsorship money being allowed for travel and appearance fees for specific players but not for prize funds. [Perhaps not, or at least not exactly. I'd misremembered something from 2005, see my 17:00 comment below.] It's a ten-round event with no draw offers before move 30 without approval. Yay. Friend of the Dirt (FODD) Arbiter Jonathan Berry is issuing yellow card warnings for first offense. Not sure what a red card means, but I'm sure it will make someone very unhappy. Double forfeit? In round five Mikhalevsky kept heaving pawns forward until Sambuev went under. Fun stuff. There was even a 1.g4 sighting on a top board, but it didn't exactly go well for White after the initial frisson of coolness after his first move.

Sun Sets in West; Anand (& Federer) Win

In the immortal words of the Black Knight, it's only a flesh wound. Deadlines, heat, and visiting family do not an efficient bloggermeister make. No matter what Al Gore says, I'm keeping my air conditioner on until the dirty hippies pry the remote from my cool, dry fingers. I don't care if they tell me it's powered by the livers of baby harp seals.

So chess, yes, we've had some, thank you very much. Vishy Anand beat Veselin Topalov in straight sets in at the Leon Magistral, holding serve by winning both whites and drawing both blacks. As Kasimjanov said before the event, the other players would only have a chance if Anand had a bad day. Instead the world #1 had two good days and left Ponomariov and Topalov banging their rackets on the grass. Ponomariov was down 2-0 against Anand before he got his seat warm and two smooth draws put Vishy into the final. Only the Kasimjanov-Topalov semifinal saw both players win a game, and Topalov needed a little luck of the Bulgarish to make it through. This was the match to watch if you were looking for serious head-hunting.

In their first game Kasimjanov had a very pretty winning tactic he failed to see: 40..Nf4! and the white d-pawn is pinned, leaving Black up a full piece. Topalov would have deserved it for playing the Catalan with white. Instead he steadily outplayed Kasim in a wild mess and eventually took the full point. There is another cute tactic for Black that could have saved the draw: 57..Qxd2+! 58.Kxd2 Rxd6+ 59.Qxd6 Ne4+. A queen sac and a rook sac followed by a fork. Topalov's nice 63.Rxg4! finished things off. If Black takes the rook, d8Q wins no matter how Black recaptures. Kasimjanov also had good chances in the second game against Topalov's Modern Benoni, but the Bulgarian was just too precise in the again-wild complications. That left it 2-0, but the Uzbekistani made it interesting by winning game three with black with an all-or-nothing attack. Fritzy says 30.Qe1 might have saved the day, but I doubt it. Topalov's KID held in the fourth game to create the expected final match.

Despite the convincing score, it wasn't an easy ride for Anand in the final. Topalov had excellent play in the first game with white and I'm not sure why he rejected the immediate grab of the h-pawn with 25.Bxh6. It was clearly less favorable after the bishop evacuated to c5 instead of being stuck back on f8. Afterward Anand said he thought he was lost. In the second game Anand showed that while a knight on the rim may be dim, two knights on the rim are pretty kickass (I think Tarrasch said that). He put Topalov's Najdorf in a bind and crashed through on the queenside in classic style while keeping just enough defense together on the kingside. Black's attack certainly looked terrifying.

It was another Spanish, fittingly, in game three and Anand changed things up in the Anti-Marshall. He again defended well against Topalov's pressure to hold the draw. Boris Spassky, who was there as an honored guest and to give a lecture, opined after the game that Black could have even played for more. Needing only a draw in the final game with white to win the match, Vishy played a tame line against the Scheveningen with 7.Be2. But things got funky quickly and White gave up a knight for three pawns, something we're used to seeing in Sicilians with a sac on b5. It worked very well here, too; some very nice evaluation and/or preparation from Anand. A few tactical blows (21.Rxd7!) finished things off. That's Anand's seventh win in Leon and his third in a row.

You have to wonder how much further ahead of the pack Anand would be on the rating list were rapid games included in the formula. Doing so would have plusses and minuses and I know some of the top players enjoy not having to worry about their ratings when they play rapid chess. But there are so many rapid events these days, and it's so easy to tabulate everything quickly, that it really should be done. It's easy enough to split them into separate and combined lists, although that's a danger in and of itself. You don't want people to be able to pick and choose which rating they use when it's convenient. Perhaps counting rapid games as 1/3 or 1/4 would do it.

Ivanchuk Wins 07 Pivdinny Bank Cup

Vassily Ivanchuk continued his winning ways with a come-from-behind victory in this three-day round-robin rapid event in Odessa, Ukraine. Grischuk started out with 3/3 on the first day, including a win over Ivanchuk. But Chukky came back with his own 3/3 on the second day to tie for the lead. Today he scored wins over tailenders Smirin and Tukmakov to take first place alone on 7/9, a half-point ahead of Grischuk, who managed only one win today. Radjabov and Shirov were a point back at 5.5 and Gelfand finished with 5. The bottom half was Drozdovskij - 4; Bacrot - 3.5; Korchnoi - 3; Smirin and Tukmakov - 2.5. Korchnoi got his lone win of the event when Smirin stuck his head far enough into the old lion's mouth with the King's Indian. Black was actually doing okay when he hung a rook to a cute knight retreat and had to resign immediately. Viva Ivanchuk! What a run he's having.

But the real show was Gelfand-Shirov in round seven, which reached a position worthy of one of our rare diagrams. The position is black to move. Shirov got the right brilliant idea but in the wrong order, although it was still enough to win easily. He played 41..Qf4+!!? 42.gxf4 Bf2+ 43.Qg3 Bxg3 and Gelfand struggled on for a while with a rook a pile of pawns against the queen and the rapidly advancing b-pawn. Gorgeous.

But there was an even more convincing and spectacular line available. 41..a1Q! 42.Qxa1 Qf4+ 43.gxf4 Bf2#. Or, and this is really cool, 42.Rxf6+ Qxf6 43.Qxf6+ Qxf6 (three consecutive Qxf6 can't be very common...) 44.gxf6 looks like a fairly simple endgame win for Black, but he doesn't need no stinkin' endgame: 44..Be3 and it's forced mate in one on g5 or f2! Get Horwitz and Kling on the line.

[Ryan points out in the comments that on the previous move for White, instead of 41.Rd5-f5 leading to the diagram, he had the sensational try 41.Rxc5! bxc5 42.Qe5!! with stalemate if Black takes the queen. Black plays on with 42..fxg5+ 43.Qxg5+ with a few dozen checks, although it looks like they should run out eventually.]

Thanks to Mikhail Golubev's fine work in the press room, as always.

XX Magistral Ciudad de León - 2007

This year's León tournament, the 20th edition, sees the format we've become used to with four players in a weekend KO of four-game rapid matches. On Friday the 6th it's Anand versus Ponomariov. On Saturday it's Topalov vs Kasimjanov. Those matches and the final on Sunday are games of 20 minutes with a 10-second increment. The indefatigable GM Zenón Franco Ocampos is in charge of the press and his latest release says there will be live games on the official site. It's a late start: 16:30 local time, 14:30 GMT, 10:30am EDT. This official site also has a "partidas en directo" link, if you can find it amongst the usual Spanish animation overload.

Last year Anand beat Topalov in the final, 2.5-1.5. A repeat of that final is clearly the favorite, but Kasimdzhanov is as tough as they come in rapid chess and has big wins over both Anand and Topalov to his credit. In an interview on the official site Kasimjanov calls Anand the favorite, saying that "if Anand has a bad day the rest of us will have our chances." Sounds about right. Anand has won this event six times, including the last two. In a simul against 16 of the region's strongest youngsters yesterday Kasim gave up two draws to Jaime Santos (11) and Pablo García Prieto (16).

[There's a results page with photos and games and recap, but it doesn't load in Firefox. That link is for Anand-Ponomariov. This one should be for Topalov-Kasimjanov when it starts.]

2007 US Women's Ch

Ready to go back to Stillwater, Oklahoma? I knew you were. This one, as the DJ says, is for the ladies. The 2007 women's championship runs July 16-20. Frank K. Berry dug around in his pockets for a $25,000 prize fund with a top prize of $7,000. It's also a zonal with three spots for the FIDE women's world championship. It's a 10-player round-robin with Black Belt annotator Irina Krush and defending champion Anna Zatonskih as the top seeds. They are playing a rough two rounds per day except for the final round. No rest days. Ouch.

The venue is the Quality Inn, which regular readers will remember as perhaps the finest hotel in the world (photo). Game broadcasts are by MonRoi, so that should be entirely trouble free since they never ever ever have any problems at all and don't you forget it or we'll come to your house and boil your pets. There's also an open at the same venue starting the day after the event ends.

I'm not motivated to cough up my usual humbug about women-only events. Many good people are doing good work, and certainly the players deserve to get whatever they can get and play where they can play. Jan Newton at the ever-essential Goddesschess is getting into the giving spirit and donating a $300 brilliancy prize. Brava! There's also a related Chess and Goddess blog.

Wanna Go to Mainz?

My homies at the ICC sent on this press release, and in the interest of jingoistic July 4th solidarity, I'm breaking with my usual high ethical laziness standards and running it complete.

It's actually not matches this year. There are two mini-tournaments with the same four players: Anand, Aronian, Kasimdzhanov, and Bacrot. One is Chess960 and the other normal rapid. I went to the official site to confirm that but none of the PDF files with the schedules and other info work. They all produce errors. But the interview with Anand on the main page mentions the new format.

Maxim Sorokin 1968-2007

Grandmaster Max Sorokin died yesterday from injuries suffered in a car crash that occurred on his way from seconding Sergey Rublevsky at the Elista candidates matches. I heard about this a few days ago but it sounded like he was okay -- and now he is gone. (The bus the players were on into Elista also had an accident, we recall.) Maxim was a good friend during our time in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where we were both newcomers of around the same age at almost the same time in 1993. He arrived there to train the Argentine team for a while and ended up staying on and marrying an Argentine woman. (The mother of GM Hugo Spangenberg, Max's principal student.) We used to swap chess lessons for Spanish lessons and either he was a much better student or I was a much better teacher!

Sadly, we didn't really keep in touch when we both left Argentina at the end of the 90's. He went back to Russia and the training program he had been a part of. He later coached in India and was training kids in Kalmykia when the accident occurred. We had a happy reunion in Moscow in 2001 when he was there to second Rublevsky at the FIDE KO WCh. He'd added a beard to his flowing mustache and was still the same happy and smiling Maxi. Chess has lost a great friend.

Hug your loved ones today, my friends. Write an old friend you've let slip away. Life is short and unpredictable.

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Kramnik, King of Dortmund

World champion Vladimir Kramnik cruised through the 2007 Dortmund supertournament without even needing his top gears. He finished off the event with well-calculated series of simplifications against pursuer Alekseev in today's final round. He won three of his four whites and won the event by a full point with a performance of nearly 2900. It's certainly no insult to say he did it without having to show his best. Carlsen and Naiditsch helped make Big Vlad's Catalan look like an alien death ray beyond human ken. Is it just that Kramnik's mastery of this most subtle of openings is so advanced that he can tie strong GMs in knots right from the start? Is he starting to pick up an aura of precision that unnerves his young opponents? He was like a snake charmer at the start of those games. (Naiditsch missed several draws in the difficult endgame.)

This is Kramnik's eighth first place in Dortmund, although I was a little surprised to find that five of those were shared firsts. (With Anand in 96, with Adams and Svidler in 98, Anand again in 2000, Topalov in 2001, and Svidler in 2006.) He took clear first in 1995 (7/9!), 1997, and 2007. He owns Dortmund the way Kasparov owned Linares. (9 wins, two of them shared). Dortmund has usually been a relatively short event, so you're going to have more shared firsts. More on Kramnik after the recap.

Leko, Anand, and Alekseev all finished undefeated with +1, not exactly inspiring stuff. Only one player both won and lost a game, a rather bizarre statistic if not a necessarily a meaningful one. Four more draws in the final round brought the total up to a tidy 75%, 24/32. We don't know if the four WCh players were saving anything for Mexico, but that sounds a bit silly considering it's two and a half months away and this was only a seven-round event.

Naiditsch-Gelfand looked headed for a droll draw when Gelfand started shuffling his king back and forth between h7 and g8. Surely the two tailenders were just headed home in a hurry, went the line of thought on ICC Chess.FM where GM Larry Christiansen was holding court. But Naiditsch failed to putter (or "poddle," in Speelman-speak) as well as Gelfand and the Israeli lashed out on the kingside after lulling the German to sleep. He had some chances but they fizzled against good defense by the now-awake Naiditsch. Gelfand finished on -2, ahead only of Naiditsch on -3. The king shuffle made me recall the Serper-Nakamura game from the 2005 US Championship.

Leko woke up as well in the final two rounds. He played a classy grind against Gelfand in round six and came close to taking clear second today against Mamedyarov. Rather surprisingly for a technician of Leko's caliber -- only Kramnik could be called a better endgame player among the elite -- he wasted a lot of time shuffling around and left himself without enough to find the win when the opportunity came. 92.Ka4, keeping the king closer to the c-pawn, saves a tempo and wins comfortably. 100.Re7 was still a win, however. With the black king cut off, there is no way to avoid the simple check and promote. Both players were on the increment by that point.

Carlsen tried for a while against Anand with a bishop pair in an endgame but Vishy drew confidently. It looked like he was going to suffer, but it seemed he knew exactly where he was going. 23..g5 is an instructive touch. Alekseev tried the new 14.Ra2 Kasimdzhanov used against Gelfand's Petroff in the candidates matches a few weeks ago. Kramnik played the new 14..Bf6 instantly and held without much trouble after finding a nice liquidation sequence. Larry thought 22.Qa4 offered White more chances.

Getting back to Kramnik and his Catalan successes, it reminds me another K and his openings. Kasparov's knowledge and affinity for the Najdorf (and earlier the King's Indian) put him miles ahead of his colleagues. He spent so much time working on them for his matches that even today he occasionally finds deep analysis decades old on today's novelties. In 1998 he spent months preparing the Najdorf for his match with Shirov, analysis that was used to push his rating to record heights in tournaments after that match was abandoned. Kramnik's Catalan and Petroff are different in that they don't require the same epic memorization of forcing lines. But his understanding of the positions seems well ahead of everyone else's and, as with Kasparov and his Najdorf, they fit his style perfectly. This combination was also the case with the Berlin for a while, which, blessedly, seems to have been played these days.

Before the event I wrote about Kramnik's "gravitational pull," the effect he seems to have in slowing the pace of the tournaments he plays in. I don't think this is entirely an illusion, although obviously he achieved something close to escape velocity in this event with +3 and a full-point victory margin. The presence of someone who you can practically be sure isn't going to lose and who will inevitably score a pair of wins must have an effect on the other competitors. Corus is too big and too long for this, but in smaller and/or shorter events, you can almost sense the rest of the players becoming more conservative, knowing that a loss will put them out of the running. Kasparov's presence was almost the opposite and quite a few players had career-best performances finishing second, or even third (!) behind him. (I believe Anand, Adams, and Shirov all had their best rating performances this way.) They knew, or perhaps just sensed, they had to throw caution to the wind and go for broke to compete for first because Kasparov was probably going to put up a huge score. Either way, it's imposing one's will on an event and the other players and the stuff that champions, or at least myths about champions, are made of.