July 2010 Archives

In case you'd like yet another data point about how busy and out of touch I am, I glanced at TWIC the other day and saw Dortmund wasn't starting until July 25th this year. "Odd," I thought. Even odder, then, was how two rounds have now come and gone without my noticing until this very moment. (This very moment being spent in a wine bar at the JFK airport after they announced a two-hour delay of my flight after I was already here. Handy status update, that.) I now see that the 25th is the end date, which makes perfect sense.

So, yes, well, Dortmund and that chess thing. I'm all over it. Well in hand. Another few glasses of this Russian River Valley Pinot Noir and I'll be set for another world-class piece of crime against chess bloggery.Two hours to go. May as well get a bottle at this point, no? Are you with me? I knew you would be. Gotta know your audience in this business. What? I've posted so infrequently there really isn't much of an audience left? And it wasn't exactly a business to begin with, I suppose. So bring me the cheese plate and on with the show.

Dortmund is in Germany (off to a roaring start), where they are still mourning their loss to Spain in The Only Sporting Event That Really Matters. (I lost most of my interest after Maradona finally proved he was a 2800 player and a 1200 coach against Germany and stranded poor Mascherano in the wilderness. I'll be bitter for maybe three years. When do qualifiers begin?) Kramnik is the uncontested king of Dortmund, having won a large number of titles I look up every year so we can all be duly impressed. But since my internet connection now is a tethered link to my Nexus phone, I really can't be bothered to check whether he's won it eight or nine times. I'm sure the below Dortmund tag will illuminate. I do remember he won it again last year with an undefeated score, stomping Carlsen in a spectacular game in the process. Where's that damn cheese plate? This is hard work.

This year it's Ruslan Ponomariov in charge with a clean score after two of ten rounds. He even beat Kramnik today, one of very few losses in Kramnik's epic Dortmund career. In round one the Ukrainian beat Leko, another member of the Very Hard to Beat Club, so about as much as one can dream of when you draw #1 and start with two whites. Mit Traumstart, indeed. The win against Kramnik came out of a nice piece sac by Super Mariov. It might all be theory, but I wouldn't know because the database on this laptop is so out of date the Playerbase has a pic of Reshevsky in a sailor suit as "recent." The computer sez Kramnik could have groveled with 17..Bd8, with lovely centralization after 18.Qd2 Qb8 19.e6 gxf4 20.e7 Qe5! and holding the balance. Kramnik has been consistently sharpening his play since he lost his title to Anand, but he went astray early in the complications here. For his part, Ponomariov attacked with impressive elan. He cashed in for an easily won rook endgame.

If it weren't for Pono's hot start and Kramnik's stumble, all eyes would be on the tournament, and super-tournament, newcomer. Vietnam has its first super-tournament participant thanks to Le Quang Liem, who won the brutal Aeroflot tournament this year to qualify for Dortmund. So far he's held up well, despite getting black against Kramnik in the first round, one of the toughest tasks in sports for a rookie. The 19-year-old held the draw in a technical position quite handily and today he somehow managed not to win against Naiditsch from a dominating position. Nice save from the German though. He wasn't so lucky in the first round, when he lost to Mamedyarov in a truly wild Sicilian line. It vaguely tickled the memory, which usually means it either follows a recent game or a Kasparov game. In this case it's apparently the latter, his loss to Topalov at the VSB in Amsterdam way back in 1996. It actually goes back to a Kavalek game, though one that might test even Lubos' prodigous memory since it was in a junior team event from 1965.

If you're keeping score at home, that puts Ponomariov in first with 2/2, Mamedyarov in second with 1.5, Le Quang Liem on even, and Leko, Kramnik, and Naiditsch -- all of whom have Dortmund titles -- tied with 0.5. Ooh, basic math, I'm really warming up here. Tomorrow's third round is Kramnik-Leko, Naiditsch-Ponomariov, and what the official site confidently lists as Mamedyarov-Le, apparently knowing more about Vietnamese naming conventions than we do.

In case I'm eventually dragged away from my Malbec by airport security, Biel starts on Saturday with an intriguing youthful cast. Now that I've heard the warning recording a dozen times, has anyone in history ever "accepted a package to take on board the aircraft from someone you don't know"? It's almost as bad as the now-defunct "did you pack your own bags?" "No, actually. Some nice young men from the local mosque took care of all that for me, even folded all my shirts and included a few wrapped gifts for the family. I'm pretty sure one of them is a clock." God, what a waste of time and energy. Security theater, coming to Broadway soon...

Two tournaments with the same format, both for the title of a US champion. The ever-innovative St. Louis Chess Club and patron Rex Sinquefield are hosting the US Women's and Junior championships simultaneously, following up on the strongest US championship in history earlier this year, won by Kamsky. The Junior title doesn't receive all that much attention in this era of tween Grandmasters, and illustrating the point is the fact that of the two 10-player round-robins, the Junior is the stronger event, with a 2372 average rating. After four rounds, Zhao is leading with three wins and a draw despite being substantially lower rated than that average. Favorites Robson, the defending champion, and Shankland are there as well, on 3 and 1.5 points.

Krush and Zatonskih are overwhelming favorites in the Women's again, in what looks like it may be an annual duel for many years to come. They are separated by only a few points at 2476 (Krush) and 2470 , but that's 150 ahead of the rest of the field. They are already tied for the lead on 3.5/4 and have drawn their individual encounter, a very sharp Benoni with Krush on the black side. Krush won as a kid back in 1998 and then again in 2007. Zatonskih won in 2006, 2008, and 2009. No small part of those titles is thanks to Zatonskih's huge career plus score over Krush despite their rating parity. It's sort of a Reshevsky-Fine situation, if rather more photogenic.

I've known the general tilt of this for a while and still can't come up with anything to say about it. But I've always believed that if you're hanging out with Liv Tyler you're doing something right. And this is certainly a more pleasant way to see a top chessplayer making the mainstream than, say, anti-Semitism or cheating accusations involving lavatories. Those who couldn't make it to Berlin might try to make it to Fashion Week in New York come Fall, but no promises.

Of course I couldn't resist a cheap pun, though for a $20K first place prize that's the only cheap thing about the win by Viktor Laznicka at the World Open. He pulled off clear first by winning six in a row to start and then drawing his way home. It wasn't quite that easy, as van Wely took big risks in a KID to try to turn the tables in the final round. But the 22-year-old Czech, on his first visit to the States, was better most of the way and forced the draw that gave him the big payday. Welcome to America!

You can get more from an elder, once-removed countryman of Laznicka's, Lubos Kavalek, who dedicates his latest column to the World Open in his usual fine style. Kamsky and Vallejo were the top seeds, but the American champion lost to Shabalov with an uncharacteristically optimistic attacking move. Vallejo drew too many games after a promising start. Laznicka was out of range and 2-4 was shared by three players who won in the final round. Harikrishna and Smirin won with black against Kazhgaleyev and Hess, respectively, and McShane beat Shabalov by going with his plan of playing 1.e4 and then 2.Nf3 and 3.Bc4 against both 1..e5 and the Sicilian. I guess when you play the Piano well you can use the same sheet music on different instruments.

Another favorite, Onischuk, had a rough ride. He lost early to McShane (see Nf3, Bc4 above) and his comeback was derailed by a brutal loss to Perelshteyn in just 24 moves. (PGN after the jump.) The domination of the white pieces in the center after the sac tells the whole story. Laznicka's own big adventure came early, in round two, in the game against Smith that Lubos annotates. Both sides missed wins in a wild game all the way to the end. Just the other day, doing some note-taking in a classic, "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk," I was charmed by Bernstein's concise definition of luck. To make it even more concise, it's that calling something bad luck removes blame, calling it good luck takes away credit. That works nicely for "luck" in chess as well.

Ping. Is this thing still on? Anyone still out there? Wow, what a week. Put it this way, probably the least intriguing part of my last seven days was flying to the Bahamas with Anatoly Karpov for two days. Oh, it's been all meetings with billionaires, signing book contracts, World Cup, no sleep, and, all the while, getting a very up close view of just how brutal and petty and, because of that, just how important chess politics can be. Seriously, if Karpov doesn't win I'm going to dump a few megs of horrific email on Wikileaks, assuming it comes back up. I mean, seriously, some poor guy who has worked much of his life to help chess under very difficult circumstances with little if any credit or assistance ends up being threatened and coerced by the very people who should be helping him. Times that by 40. I'm no innocent, and I knew it was bad, but not this bad. Ugh.

I'll be putting up some more FIDE politics here soon and also sharing some interesting material from my Bahamas trip with Daaim at the Chess Drum, including photos. It wasn't the best political trip, but hanging out with Karpov was interesting in many ways. Plus, I got to order him his first Goombay Smash. We also did a long interview I'll be organizing and sending over to ICC Chess.FM. The campaign is about to get very serious, as the earliest volleys of the mother of all lawsuits are landing on FIDE's various desks at the moment. They've been running a very sloppy ship for a long time and hubris has a way of catching up with you.

So on to more banal and uplifting topics, like the new rating list, where Magnus Carlsen has become the first person to get within shouting distance of Garry Kasparov's nigh-mythical 2851 of eleven years ago. His latest rating is 2826, 13 points higher than anyone else other than Kasparov (Topalov hit 2813). It also puts Carlsen 23 points ahead of #2 on the list, the same Topalov, surely the largest gap at the top since Kasparov's days.

Speaking of 20-point gaps, that's what's between #5 Aronian and #6 Mamedyarov. Despite the Armenian's relatively mediocre results this year, he's been keeping his rating up and keeping him in the super club with Carlsen, Topalov, Anand, and Kramnik. Wang Yue plunged 36 points, going from #8 to #28, perhaps enough to spare us his stultifying solidity for a while. The good news is that the lively Wang Hao has popped up into super-tournament range to replace him.

So, what's new? What's next? Other than Argentina-Germany in eight hours, that is.