|
Whoo-hoo, really picking up the pace around here. This week marks the Dos Hermanas tournament, which has become an online-only affair. The decrepit among you may recall that this used to be a flesh-and-blood tournament in Spain, one that deserved the overused "super" appellation in its heyday. The 1993 edition included Polgar, Adams, and a pre-bloat Karpov, who won the event by a full point with 7.5/9. 1994 was even stronger, with Topalov and winner Gelfand entering at the expense of jettisoning a few more of the local Spanish players. By 1995 the only local boy was Illescas. (I don't think Shirov played for Spain until 1996, but he may have already changed federations.) Kamsky tied for first with Karpov and Adams in a powerful category 18 event, stronger than that year's Linares event. It got even tougher in the next few years, reaching category 19 (2700 elo) in 1996, 97, and 99. Kramnik, Anand, Ivanchuk, and Svidler joined the impressive list of participants.
1999, won by Adams, was the end of the elite round-robin under the Dos Hermanas name. In a radical move, starting in 2000 the tournament took place as an online KO blitz event on the Internet Chess Club. The system has been refined over the years to its current format: a 12-round Swiss qualifier that puts 32 players into the KO final of mini-matches. The first prize is two thousand euros, which, by the time you read this, should be roughly three million dollars. There are various side prizes for ICC members and special gifts from the Spanish magazine "Péon de Rey".
There is still an OTB event in Dos Hermanas, however. On April 18-20, a quadrangular rapid event takes place with Topalov, Shirov, Polgar, and Vallejo. The last big Dos Hermanas Open was in 2006.
The time control for the online event is three minutes with no increment, which has become the de facto standard of choice by the GM community for online blitz. They believe it is the best compromise between quality and not giving enough time to cheat, although this has been exposed as wishful thinking any number of times. A quick and sloppy study I did years ago on the games of this event showed that they were often more "computer accurate" than those played at classical time controls, occasionally scoring 80%+ agreement with Fritz. Several titled players have been disqualified in the past for getting caught cheating and others have confessed to playing improvised advanced chess. It would be interesting to see if the "Fritz Agreement Index" has dropped, although that could just mean the players have gotten savvier about it. Note that this sort of broad statistical comparison has only a superficial commonality with Danailov's attempt to use such numbers to slander an opponent.
The list of players this year, ironically or perhaps not, includes former Dos Hermanas supertournament participant Illescas, though Kamsky seems to be giving it a miss this time. Blitz maniac Hikaru Nakamura is another hot favorite. Last year's surprise winner, Jorge Sammour-Hasbun (the artist formerly known as Jorge Zamora), is back and is again showing fine form. He won his qualifier with 11/12, as did Nakamura, Tigran Petrosian, and Baadur Jobava.
Levon Aronian ran away with the Melody Amber tournament. Well, mostly he stayed steady while everyone else took turns being bashed. Aronian had a tepid showing in 2007, but this time he was firing on all cylinders in both the rapid and the blindfold sections. With one round to play, Armenia's finest has a share of first in the blindfold with 6/10 along with Kramnik and Morozevich, who typically dominate the sans voir section. It's in the rapid where Aronian is running away. His 7.5 is two full points ahead of the rest of the field. That gave him the tournament win in the combined standings with a round to spare. He's leading the combined standings by two and a half points. Kramnik, Topalov, Carlsen, and Leko follow. The surprise of the event is Vishy Anand's mediocre play. He usually doesn't enjoy the blindfold very much, relying on his rapid chess dominance to keep him in contention for the top spots. Right now he's in equal 8-9th in the rapid with a relatively respectable 5.5 in the blindfold. He's played a couple of truly horrid games, prompting Kasparov to wonder if the world champ is ailing in Nice.
Leko and Carlsen drew their two games in the 10th round. It was a preview of this year's Miskolc rapid match, which has become an annual affair for Leko on his home soil. This year's opponent in the eight-round affair is Magnus Carlsen. The match opens on May 27. Last year Kramnik beat Leko by the narrowest margin. It should be an interesting test for both players. Leko has been a problem for Carlsen, notching three wins in the past year against no losses. Barring oddities, Carlsen will be ahead of Leko on the rating list by the time the match takes place.
Showing no signs of slowing down, unlike this blog, Vishy Anand is leading the ever-powerful Melody Amber rapid-blindfold tournament. This year the annual Monaco spectacular is taking place in Nice, France. They've even added some new blood, which is great. It was starting to feel more like a reunion, with tendencies toward a retirement home. This year Carlsen and Karjakin are there to make everyone else feel old. Mamedyarov is also playing. Topalov is also back. Last year Kramnik bum-rushed the show with 6.5 in the rapid and an astounding 9/11 in the blindfold section. Anand's impressive 8.5/11 in the rapid couldn't compensate for a negative score in the blindfold games. Nobody is threatening to run away with it so far this year.
Kramnik got his bum rushed by Anand in their first-round rapid duel thanks to beautiful tactical shot that is coming to an anthology near you as we speak. 42..Qf3!! is not only spectacular and forces mate, but it's also the only winning move. This shot elicited a low whistle of admiration from Kasparov as we looked over the games from the first day during his recent stop in NY. 42..Rh1+ is only a repetition draw. This sees and raises Kramnik's pretty blitz crush of Anand last year in Moscow, which also had a queen sac. Are they scheduled to meet again before their world championship match in October? With that in mind it's worth noting that Anand's win came with black (like most of his wins at Linares) and Kramnik's Petroff was undentable as ever. Speaking of future world championship matches, the Karjakin-Carlsen minimatch was split 1-1. Carlsen won the blindfold in that horrid line of the Najdorf we just saw in Radjabov-Shirov at Linares. Ugh. Karjakin got revenge in the rapid against Carlsen's Alekhine's Defense.
Ivanchuk has been playing some very interesting chess so far and today beat Karjakin with a queen sac in the rapid. Vassssss-eeeee-leeeeee! Gelfand played an amusing stalemate to save his kosher bacon against Aronian. Round 4 is in progress at the excellent official site. There are cool videos and more there and at the ICC.
World Champion Vishy Anand of India has won his second straight Linares title, his third Linares crown overall. (First was in 1998.) He cruised through the last half of the tournament, playing a total of 150 moves in his last six games, all drawn. This low-risk strategy was rewarded when none of his competitors could put together a push to reach his winning +3 score. This is the third year in a row that +3 has been enough for clear first place in Linares. That's not to say this was a tranquil tournament, quite the opposite. Other than Anand, who lost only one game, to Aronian (just like last year, oddly), every player had at least two losses. Even last place finishers Leko and Shirov, who finished on -3, had two wins apiece. There were only three decisive games in the final three rounds, however, which tipped the balance to a 55% draw rate for the event. (It was under 50% at the halfway point.) 70% is not unusual for Linares-level events.
Much of the credit must go to the remarkable fighting spirit shown by Magnus Carlsen and Veselin Topalov. Carlsen finished in second place for the second year in a row. Last year he had to share the 2-3 spot with Morozevich thanks to a final-round loss to Peter Leko. This time he had 2nd to himself thanks to an amazing and bizarre 12th-round win over Topalov. Carlsen's typically ambitious play led to a position that should have ended in a draw by repetition in one of several ways. Instead Topalov, typically ambitious himself, found a way to avoid the repetitions with 34..Nc6. Unfortunately for the Bulgarian, this allowed a forced checkmate with a pretty bishop retreat he must have missed entirely. (To be fair, many of the kibitzing GMs also failed to see it live.) This was Carlsen's second win over Topalov in the event and it adds another strange chapter to a book that includes Topalov resigning in a drawish position against Carlsen at Linares last year.
It also meant that the tiebreak situation was complicated headed into the final round. Apart from the title, the Linares Grand Slam spot in Bilbao was up for grabs. If Anand lost to Topalov in the final round things could get messy. The first tiebreak was head-to-head this year, so if Anand and Carlsen tied for first Vishy would take the title. But if a three-way tie resulted with Topalov, it would go to Carlsen due to even head-to-head combined score with Anand and Topalov and his lead in the second tiebreak, most wins. So Anand needed only a draw with white against Topalov to lock up first and he achieved that without much drama. Carlsen could still reach a tie for first on points with white against Radjabov. Curiously he went for the Topalov-Radjabov instant endgame line of the Schliemann that we'd seen just a few days earlier. He got even less than Topalov did and settled for a draw. Between the endgame line of the Marshall Shirov played against Aronian and Leko and this Schliemann line, we skipped the middlegame entirely in at least four games.
Carlsen won five games and showed that the only question is how strong he will eventually become if he's this good at 17. When Kasparov retired in 2005 few imagined we would ever see any player dominate that way again. Suddenly it's quite easy to imagine a 19-year-old Carlsen as the favorite in every event he plays. He is always aggressive and optimistic but also wins positional grinds and tricky endgames. He wins from worse positions (against Ivanchuk and Topalov in particular) and with strong new opening ideas (Shirov). Three losses showed he still has a lot of room for progress, a terrifying thought. Topalov's tournament was similarly up and down, but without the excuse of being a hormonally charged teen. I kept waiting for him to put together a string of wins and it looked like he was ready to pull it off at any moment. And yet each time he won he followed it with a loss. Topalov has always suffered the predictable consequences of maximum aggression. Usually he is a net beneficiary of this admirable attitude. Here his losses, four of them, almost looked careless. Three of them should have been at least drawn with routine caution. The horrible loss to Carlsen's Alekhine's Defense (!) was another matter, if one perhaps even more troubling for Topalov fans.
Aronian tied with Topalov on +1 in a relatively discreet performance. He had a spectacular win with black against Anand, offset by two opportunistic wins against Topalov and Ivanchuk. He took several short draws in positions that were just begging to be played out, although he was far from the only culprit in that department. Radjabov also confirmed his reputation for sporadic timidity. He reached an even score regardless thanks to a total collapse by Shirov in round 13. The entire game had been played before up to move 20, when Shirov either missed 21.b4 completely or hallucinated that he'd be able to save the rook. 20..Bh4?? goes down as one of the worst forest-for-the-trees moves in recent memory. (20..g5 was played before.) "A subtle maneuver that sidesteps g5, controls e1, and prepares ..Re8. Oh, and it hangs the Rd5." Ouch. That was the last wheel off the buggy for Shirov, who lost all four of his blacks in the Linares half of the tournament after initially defying predictions and finishing the Mexico half on +1.
Leko pretty much rotted equally on both sides of the Atlantic for the worst result in his memory since he was 16 and finished -5 at Dortmund. This is a man who would lose five games per year and here he lost five games in a single tournament. I felt bad when I heard that Macauley Peterson was talking to Leko after the final round and the Hungarian grimly joked that "I bet Mig is happy now." Ouch. I'm sure I've teased Leko more than his fair share over the years due to his drawish proclivities, but I'd never wish bad results on anyone. I root against openings I find boring, yes, so I cheer for anyone who beats the Petroff or the Berlin Defense, for example. But barring that I don't hope for negative results for anyone and certainly not someone as nice as Peter. That said, as a fan I'm delighted to see new guys like Carlsen and Aronian mixing it up, although as I said above, Aronian tanks it on occasion despite his fighting reputation.
I'm more concerned about how some players in supertournaments can draw 80% of their games, lose more than they win, and still keep a high rating and get invited back every year at the expense of new blood. (Mamedyarov counts as new blood but so far he's the epitome of this complaint.) Leko is without a doubt one of the strongest players in the world. He has won titles in Dortmund, Linares, and Wijk aan Zee, something few can say. Anyone who doubts his qualities need only look at the Linares game Aronian-Leko, a defensive masterpiece for the ages that was played at rapid tempo after Leko used 84 minutes (!) on his 9th move to consider his response to Aronian's amazing novelty. I think living in the elite bubble for so long has hurt Leko's killer instinct, which was never that of a rabid grizzly to begin with. He hasn't played anyone outside of the superelite in years, mostly due to his avoidance of team competitions. In club and national team events the big dogs on board one are expected to crush their opponents, which might provide the vegetarian Leko with a little chessic red meat now and then.
Ivanchuk was, well, very Ivanchuk. He blew two games in horrible time trouble, including a forced win against Aronian he turned into a loss by hanging a bishop. He played quite a few interesting games but his only wins were both against the hapless Leko. The overall level of play in Linares was quite spotty, with more blunders and more time trouble than we are used to seeing. This goes hand in hand with the fewer draws and fighting chess, so it's wrong to complain too much about a few blunders.
The future of the tournament is in some doubt. The Morelian organizers sounded quite sure the tournament wouldn't return there in 2009 due to costs. They did hope it might be able to come back to Morelia every two years. We'll see if Linares finds another partner. Since the municipality is the main sponsor we shouldn't expect too prompt an announcement on these things.
The win put Anand into the six-player Bilbao Grand Slam final along with Corus winner (tiebreaks) Aronian. MTel, which begins on May 7 and Dortmund in July will produce the other two qualifiers. The other two will be selected by the organizers. The calendar has suddenly become quite crowded with the appearance of the FIDE Grand Prix tournaments, on which more later. The Garry is in town for a speech here in NY on Thursday, so time has been at a premium.
Round 11: Radjabov-Anand, Aronian-Ivanchuk, Topalov-Shirov, Leko-Carlsen. It's been a crazy tournament so far and I doubt the all-draw round on Saturday will be the new pattern. Radjabov beat Anand with white at Corus in January and it will be interesting to see if we get another Anti-Moscow Semi-Slav. Interestingly, Macauley reported that Radjabov said he thought there were too many rest days in Linares. Easy for the 20-year-old to say! I doubt Anand and Ivanchuk would agree. Speaking of Corus, Leko beat Carlsen there while Aronian and Ivanchuk drew. Topalov beat Shirov the last time they played, Corus 2007.
Today is the Linares showdown between leader Anand and Magnus Carlsen, who is keeping the heat on. Carlsen beat Shirov in an impressive game in round 9 yesterday. A strong novelty (18.Ra6!) in a line Shirov knows well put the Spatvian into the tank for 75 minutes. (Not quite Leko's tourney record of 84 minutes on a single move.) Carlsen worked on an extra pawn deep into the endgame until Shirov blundered on move 79. How exactly to avoid Black giving up the bishop for the pawn isn't clear. If the knight tries to get to c7 or d6, the black rook goes wide to check on the first rank. It seems likely this is a win by force eventually though. The win put Carlsen on +2, a half-point back of Anand, who held Aronian nicely. Ivanchuk beat Leko with black in the battle of the tail-enders. Leko nearly flagged -- in fact Ivanchuk thought he had flagged and called the arbiter. But he'd been looking at the screen behind the stage and not the clock on the table and Leko actually still had two seconds on his clock when he made his 40th move. It was lost by then, however. Topalov went for an instant endgame against Radjabov's Schliemann Lopez. He made Black work for a while but it looked like Black was always holding. 44.Kxg4 is one to try.