January 2011 Archives

I figured I should start a separate item so this discussion -- a typically endless one -- doesn't clog the tournament thread. I wish I had the time to follow this up more, but if I don't get this book done by the end of the month I will be sleeping with the fishes.

As mentioned in the NY Times chess blog, Kasparov livened up the debate about the historical place in US chess Nakamura's win represents. Here's the full quote:

"Fischer never won a tournament ahead of the world champion. He was second in Santa Monica. Of course there were far fewer such events back then, and Fischer had several great tournament results like Stockholm 62, but it's interesting. Reuben Fine only equaled Keres on points at AVRO in 38. Then you have Marshall at Cambridge Springs in 1904 ahead of Lasker, though Tarrasch wasn't there. So unless you include Capablanca as an American player, I think you can go back to Pillsbury at Hastings 1895 for an American tournament victory on par with Nakamura's!"

It was his response to my assumption that "since Fischer" was the obvious time period to look at for American wins ahead of world champions since Fischer was God, right? But in Fischer's day there were few big round robins with the world champion and his peers coming together. Unlike today, when it seems like the usual suspects assemble fortnightly, not that I'm complaining. And Fischer took a lot of time off from international play. Botvinnik wasn't playing tournaments -- he and Fischer played only once, in their famous Varna Olympiad endgame battle. Fischer had his shots at Tal, finishing a point behind him in Bled 61, though finally beating him in their individual game. Fischer also beat Petrosian there. Fischer did dominate the big 1970 Rovinj/Zagreb round-robin that included Smyslov, Korchnoi, and Petrosian, but Spassky was absent. To Garry it's not a technicality that several times Fischer finished ahead of a world champion while not winning the tournament, as he did in Santa Monica.

I don't think Kasparov overlooked Kamsky winning the FIDE World Cup in 2007. He's never thought much of those KOs as "serious" events even, or especially, when they were world championships. Obviously there was nothing trivial about taking out Svidler, Carlsen, and Shirov. But we were being rather restrictive in the parameters, talking about finishing ahead of a world champion in a tournament, not just great results. Fischer's Interzonal results at Stockholm and Palma are deservedly legendary, so context is important. These days, with so many tournaments and a general parity, finishing ahead of Kramnik or Anand is hardly rare, and not just for Aronian or Carlsen. Heck, Anand hasn't won a tournament in three years. But finishing ahead of all four of them -- and they were playing well! -- that's something. It's definitely a special day for American chess.

My trivia-addled brain wants to toss out Bologan's amazing win at Dortmund 2003, ahead of Kramnik and Anand by a full point. But I like to give style points, and +5 kicks Nakamura's result up a big notch. Write your local paper about it, would you? It would be nice to see this get some coverage. I know Americans don't care much about chess as a sport, or even consider it a sport, but they do like winners, especially ones who do it against the odds.

By the way, Garry has a review of Frank Brady's new bio of Fischer, "Endgame" in The New York Review of Books in a few weeks. We're still doing the finishing touches with the editors, but it's good stuff. So is Brady's book. There was a lot of good material from Garry on Fischer that was left on the cutting room floor for space and other reasons. I'll try to find a home for it when I have time. It was fun going back over Vol. 4 of My Great Predecessors, such a mountain of material in there.

Wow. Even when he was in clear first with two rounds to go you didn't want to say it out loud and jinx it, the way none of the other players will talk about a no-hitter in progress in baseball. But now it's over! Hikaru Nakamura, the 23-year-old from White Plains, NY and two-time US champion, just achieved the biggest victory of his career at the Tata Steel Chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. He finished in clear first place with six wins, one loss, and six draws. Trailing him were world champion Viswanathan Anand, world #1 Magnus Carlsen, #3 Levon Aronian, and former world champion Vladimir Kramnik. Nakamura's +5 score was the highest in the Wijk aan Zee A Group since 2002 2006 and was good for a incredible performance rating of 2879. The result will push the American into the top seven in the world with the top five in reach. Congratulations!

[It was just a guess the first time, but then, despite looking for it specifically in Anand's results for the past 10 years and in the Wijk site history page, I still managed to overlook that Anand and Topalov tied for first at Wijk aan Zee in 2006 with +5. Inexcusable blindness. Usually this sort of thing is cleared up quickly thanks to the fact-checking department, aka the comments, but I haven't had time to read them lately.]

The final round was a bit of a piffle otherwise, as final rounds often are. Every game was drawn in the A Group for the first time this tournament. The two key games, Nakamura-Wang Hao and Nepomniachtchi-Anand were actually interesting, however. Nakamura surprised his opponent with a shift into a Benoni structure, probably a smart decision to go for more forcing play and avoid a long grinding game in which nerves might become an issue. He swapped pieces, offered an exchange sac on b4, and invited Wang Hao to take on considerable risk to play for a win. The Chinese declined and took the draw on move 22. Nakamura then had to sweat out whether or not Nepomniachtchi's exchange sac for a blockade was going to be enough to hold Anand. After 38 moves it was and Nakamura became the clear Tata Steel champion. An amazing tournament for him, especially with two wins coming after a rough loss to Carlsen that might have derailed him.

Aronian tried to move up to reach Anand against Smeets but couldn't make it happen. Shirov and l'Ami also showed up for work. Grischuk-Carlsen was admirably sharp, if mostly played before, but they fizzled out before move 20. Carlsen ended on +3, which was quite an good score considering the number of lapses he had. Only Nakamura had more wins than his five and of the only three decisive games between the six plus-score players, two were Carlsen wins. The other was Nakamura's win over Vachier-Lagrave. Speaking of, in the final round Vachier-Lagrave moved his queen four times in a row against Kramnik early in a Grunfeld and lived. A very strong performance from the Frenchman, who finished on +2 with Kramnik and lost only that one game.

In the middle on down, really only Giri's even score stands out due to his youth. He only won two games, but one was against Carlsen and he was pressing against Anand and Nakamura. The 16-year-old is clearly ready to handle the A Group and will likely be a fixture for the next dozen years at least. Grischuk was unrecognizable, losing five games. Shirov, who started with five wins last year and finished =2-3, came in dead last. But with him we're used to the highs and lows. At least he helped out the locals by keeping Smeets and l'Ami out of the cellar. Smeets started strong but just couldn't keep his head above water. l'Ami was the only winless player. Nepomniachtchi and Wang Hao both played some interesting chess and were welcome additions. Ponomariov showed his solidity for an even score, but he seemed to go into a shell for a while in the middle.

It will take some research, and of course it will be subject to debate, but this is a strong contender for the best individual American tournament result since Fischer. Kamsky's match run to the FIDE world championship in 94-95 deserves mention, as does his victory at the FIDE KO in 2007. But you can count the number of times an American has finished ahead of a reigning world champion, let alone a field like this year's Wijk aan Zee. And by "you can count" I mean "You'd better do the counting because I'm too lazy/busy to look through that much data right now and off the top of my head I've got nothing." Kamsky at Las Palmas 94 and Seirawan at Haninge in 1990 are about it for big round-robin wins, and both were ahead of Karpov, not Kasparov. Both were Candidates and Kamsky a FIDE title challenger. Or am I forgetting a big one? Is there a Browne or Kavalek or Christiansen result that should be in there? Probably.

Of course this isn't just a great result "for an American." +5 is rarefied territory in super-tournaments. Making a list with Topalov, Carlsen, and Ivanchuk as the few to do it recently shows how hard it is. It's also great because with Nakamura playing rabbit, the other contenders were forced to push. That is, just because Anand and Kramnik haven't put up +5 in over a decade doesn't mean they haven't won plenty of tournaments. [As corrected above, Anand did it in 2006, sorry for the error.] They just haven't had to put up big scores to win them. +3 is great if it wins the event, but if it's only good for fourth place you'd better raise your game and stop taking days off. This is why nobody is asking why Peter Leko hasn't played in so long. Fresh blood!

So, what's up with Linares? All I remember hearing is that they were considering a Bilbao-style outdoor element and that Carlsen would be there, but that was a while ago.

There are only two rounds left to play in Wijk aan Zee and for the second time, Hikaru Nakamura is the sole leader of the illustrious A Group. He has bounced back from a crushing loss to Carlsen in round 8 to win his second in a row today, outplaying Nepomniachtchi on the black side of a Caro-Kann. That separated Nakamura from Anand, who drew against Vachier-Lagrave. The win also propelled Nakamura into the rarefied territory of +5, which hasn't been obtained by a Wijk winner since Bareev in 2002's "Corus Lite" that didn't include Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik, or Topalov. (As I tweeted, Shirov reached +5 after just five rounds last year, but eventually fell to +3.)

Of course this year's tournament isn't over yet either. Nakamura finishes with white against Kramnik and then black against Wang Hao. Kramnik just lost to Carlsen and I sort of doubt he'll be feeling frisky with black. I'd love to be wrong, and this is no longer the ultra-pragmatic Kramnik who once went three years without winning with black. But 1.e4, Petroff/Berlin, and draw in 26 seems more likely. Wang Hao isn't in great shape, but he's dangerous and doesn't give up cheap draws with white, so Nakamura can't get complacent.

And then there's that other guy. You know, the world champion and five-time Wijk aan Zee winner, Vishy Anand. He's just a half-point back, hasn't lost a game, and finishes with white against Giri tomorrow and then black against the combative Nepomniachtchi. Aronian is a full point back of Nakamura, but he has games with l'Ami and Smeets and might be feeling ambitious. For some reason it surprised me Aronian hasn't lost a game either. He's had a very inconspicuous tournament but is somehow on +3. I'm going to make stuff up and say that shows how strong he's become.

Nakamura's win was very sharp stuff and a lot of fun to go over. He played an early novelty, 7..Bg4, that he says was inspired by a Karpov recommendation. It certainly worked out better than the loss he had to Svidler in Amsterdam last year. Nepo gave up his e-pawn for a kingside push and invasion that looked very dangerous. Nakamura defended like a demon and, just like the Caro-Kann is supposed to work, Black gained the advantage when White overpressed. 21.g4 is probably a mistake, but if you don't play that what the hell is White doing? You have to go for it by that point or your just down a pawn and waiting for Black to consolidate, which won't take long. The tactics just weren't there for White though and once Nakamura got the initiative he was ruthlessly accurate to stop all of White's tricks and finish off the young Russian champion. That's two consecutive steam-rollerings against top-20 players by Nakamura, who is now #7 with a bullet on the Live List.

Carlsen and Kramnik are tied on +2 after Mighty Magnus got one back from Big Vlad today in what looked like a very Kramnikian game. In the same "Bogo-Catalan" line in which he beat Topalov a few months ago in Nanjing, Carlsen nabbed a pawn, held on with some sharp calculations, and then won a lovely pawn-up endgame with a knight versus a bishop. Kramnik must have missed a draw in there somewhere, but that's usually how these things go. It's just usually Kramnik on the side doing the squeezing and forcing the errors. Remarkable stuff. I'd love to know when Carlsen started to see the winning structures. If he knew during the game that the 59..Bc8 he mentioned afterwards was a draw, yow. That there's a square problem with the bishop on b7 instead of c8 is tricky, though not something Kramnik would normally miss. (The bishop has to be able to go to a6 to stop ..Kf1, since it can't reach that diagonal from a8 or a4, which is covered by the knight.) I think it just "felt" drawn for so long that Kramnik got lulled to sleep a little. Carlsen and Kramnik have slugged back and forth since they first met in 2007. Kramnik had won their last two classical encounters, including at Wijk last year. I think he's still +1 overall.

Interesting bit in the official report; Kramnik offered a draw on move 22. Carlsen: "I know Kramnik well and I know what it means when he offers a draw. It meant I had to play on." Smart, if a little cheeky to say it. I think this is less about the position and the implication that Kramnik thought it was starting to go sour than about Kramnik. He's an energy guy who doesn't always feel it. Forcing him to play when he obviously didn't want to was an instant psychological edge. It's just that not many people have the cojones, or the chops, to turn down a quick draw against the former world champion and live to tell the tale. I'm probably reading too much into that since it looks like Black was clearly getting a little edge, but Kramnik isn't used to having such offers rejected and I'm sure it wasn't pleasant.

Nice of them to mention the draw offer, so allow me to refresh one of my habitual rants about how we discard all this information. Both players must record draw offers on their scoresheets, but this essential information vanishes into the database formats we all all rely on at home and in online viewers. The clock times, critical to understanding the flow and the key moments of the game in the minds of the players, and which are recorded automatically by the relay software every top tournament uses, also vanish. Moronic. It's like the script of a play without the stage direction. Organizers need to export the scores of top events with the clock times and draw offers and the clearinghouses like TWIC and ChessBase have to preserve them. If PGN is awkward for this, improve it or use something else. Make it so!

Four players are tied for the lead in the B Group, the winner qualifying for next year's A Group. Should be a fun final couple of days. Round 12: Nakamura-Kramnik, Anand-Giri, Ponomariov-Shirov, l'Ami-Aronian, Smeets-Grischuk, Carlsen-Wang Hao, Vachier-Lagrave-Nepomniachtchi. Note that Sunday's final round begins 90 minutes early.

It seems a rose by any other name will still produce around 65% drawn games. Just like the last few editions of the Wijk aan Zee A Group, the first Tata Steel tournament is seeing as many split points as there are split peas in the famous local soup. Round two was particularly peaceful, which was not appreciated by Peter Svidler and I since we were doing live commentary on Chess.FM that day. It looked grim early, even without a Petroff or Berlin in the bunch. In game after game Peter said something like "I don't like this at all for White," or "this doesn't promise much for White." And right he was, in game after game. Only the typically razor-sharp Botvinnik Semi-Slav between Giri and the ultra-prepared Smeets showed real signs of life. Even that one finished drawn. White would have had a much harder time of it had Smeets found 33..Qd6 34.Bd3 Qd5 and White has to find more only moves to hang on. As it was, Smeets, who is seconded by my homeboy Jan Gustafsson and also had some devastating prep to beat Shirov in round 1, was up over an hour on the clock at one point but still ended up in time trouble. Impractical.

It was up to Wang Hao to save the day and avoid a sweep of draws. The Chinese player did so by overreaching in an endgame against Nepomniachtchi after finally equalizing. Black had equalized rapidly against Wang Hao's opening bailout. Surprised by Nepo's KID he went for a queen swap that gave him very little. He avoided a repetition only to miss 32..Ne4 and the inevitable loss of a critical queenside pawn. The young Russian champion slowly ground him down, a sad irony of paying for being too combative in a round in which just about everybody else took it easy.

Aronian, for example, got a big plate of squat against Nakamura's Dutch. What, he didn't expect 1..f5 in the Netherlands? More relevantly, against Nakamura, who has been playing it regularly? More likely he was just surprised by 7..Nc6 where the American has played 7..c6 many times in the past year or so. Aronian has long prided himself for being an original player in the openings but he didn't want a piece of Nakamura after it was clear Black had easily equalized and he offered the draw on move 17. Grischuk didn't fare much better against Vachier-Lagrave, though he tried harder. Svidler wasn't sure what the point of White's opening was with the white knight on c3 so early and his prognostication that Black could equalize or more with a quick knight maneuver to e6 was spot on. The big Anand-Kramnik match was fizzled by Kramnik's nicely prepped exchange sac in the Nimzo. Shirov had to bail out of a Scotch against Carlsen, who didn't have more than a sharp repetition. Ponomariov started to worry he was worse against l'Ami and made a strategic draw offer, which was strategically accepted.

I didn't really mean to skip round one, which I also rode shotgun on with Peter, but round two does make a better platform to insert a rote rant about the need for Sofia rules. Tata is a long event and it would surely take a toll on the veterans especially to make them play chess every day for 13 rounds. But still, Wijk is starting to stand out more and more in this regard, and not in a good way. Agreed draws with a board full of pieces are a joke that hasn't been funny for a long time now.

Conveniently enough for my Pulp Fictionesque narrative, two of the winners in the first round are our current leaders. Anand started off by reminding us what a Sicilian looks like against Ponomariov. The world champ won so convincingly you wonder why it seems like all the Sicilians are in the witness protection program these days. Ponomariov held on grimly after Anand missed the lovely computer shot 38..Rxf2!! but then found a unique way to get his queen trapped on e6. Not easy. Pono then had to endure online heckling from bozos he would literally beat blindfolded from the white side saying he should resign instead of play on. I never get that. Sure, some guys play on longer than others might, hoping for a miracle, but since when do fans tell players of a sport to quit? It's not like he's a boxer out there having the sawdust knocked out of his ears like an Arturo Gatti Winnie the Pooh. Ponomariov is #11 in the world. He doesn't need you, on behalf of what your computer tells you, to be embarrassed for him. Plus, from a purely sporting perspective, everyone knows you might gain a tiny plus in the big picture by tiring out an older gent, a category that includes Anand. It takes more energy to win an easily won position than to lose one. Plus, being one of those annoying people who never resigns can be disheartening to your opponents. Most players just don't have the stomach to look at a lost position for a long time.

Shirov didn't have to worry about that in his first-round game against Smeets. He played the first 21 moves of his game against Ivanchuk at Wijk last year and resigned three moves later. Smeets, and Gusti, of course, had cooked up something subtle and nasty with 22.Bd7 and Shirov fell into one of the many traps in the position when he tried for activity with the entirely logical-looking 23..Ra8. This loses the exchange by force to a surprising knight two-step combined with the oddly limited scope of the black queen. A nice piece of work, but dismal from Shirov to be caught out so badly in a position he could only have expected to see again. Svidler said he'd worked on this position himself for a while and Black seemed to be holding up. (Leko beat Caruana with white in the same Wijk last year, but sacrificing a piece against Peter Leko is usually suicidal.)

Carlsen started out with a Scotch against Aronian and played a new idea out of an old playbook. Svidler mentioned he'd analyzed 12.0-0-0 for the Russian Championship, but 15.Qf3 seemed new. At least for a few hours, when I talked with Garry and he mentioned it was in his analysis from 1993. Which means Carlsen likely perused the same lines, though he might have disagreed with Garry's old note, "only good for a draw." Aronian came through fine and Black was for choice quite soon. In the end the best he could get was a cute repetition draw. White was looking good optically earlier but the expected 19.h5 runs into 19..g5 and suddenly White has nothing. Great sharp stuff throughout.

Nakamura settled a score, or at least healed a wound, by beating Grischuk in a remarkably smooth effort. He got a promising position out of the opening and built it up steadily until Grischuk felt compelled to sacrifice a piece for drawing chances. A computer would probably find some ingenious queen maneuvers to hold on for a good long time, but it wasn't going to happen here. Impressive stuff in that it's really not common for a top player to lose so helplessly, without making a serious mistake. Ivan Sokolov agreed and gave Nakamura the daily game prize. This helped heal the pain of Nakamura's blown win against Grischuk a few months ago in the final round of the Tal Memorial, a win that would have given him a share of the title. (Not to mention Nakamura's subsequent tweet that he would then have to crush Grischuk like a baby in the blitz, which didn't exactly work out, as he disarmingly admits in his blog. Plus, baby crushing is really out of fashion these days.)

Speaking of top players losing in unusual ways, Magnus Carlsen seems intent on treating the #1 spot on the rating list like a frisbee. He grabs it, he throws it away, he grabs it, he loses in 22 moves with white to Giri. He started testing fate with the extravagantly odd move 12.Qd2, when just about anything else seems to make more sense. Easy to say in hindsight, of course, but it does seem like the queen's only job on d2 is to be hit in the combination Giri played. Carlsen stayed ambitious, which didn't work out well. Giri took the initiative and then picked up a piece when Carlsen missed that he couldn't get the knight back with 22.Qxb6 because of 22..e2 23.Re1 Qxc1! 24.Rxc1 e1Q+ 25.Rxe1 Rxe1+ 26.Bf1 Bh3 and Black is up a piece. Oops. The last hope of forking the knight and queen with 22.Be3 lost to 22..Qg4 (22..Nc4 was also good). Carlsen sounded like he just missed ..e3, which seems impossible.

Thus begins another round of "shortest loss by a world #1 / world champion" trivia. Anand has lost a couple of classical games in 25 moves lately, including a crushing loss to Aronian with white in 2009. Carlsen just lost to Sjugirov in 25 at the Olympiad. Kramnik lost in just 20 moves with white to Topalov in Wijk aan Zee 2005, during his painful 1.e4 phase -- which was even more painful than his mullet phase. The same year he lost in 20 moves with black to Anand. Anyway, it was ugly and it's a big part of the reason Carlsen has already slipped to third on the live list.

For the second year in row, Nakamura beat Shirov. There was an entertaining exchange of tactical shots that seemed to last forever. White came out a pawn ahead but Black had a bishop and was very active. Then it entered a long technical phase punctuated with little tactics. 58.Nb3! looks like a typo at first, offering a key pawn with check, but it got the knight to d4 and from there to f5. The white connected passers on the kingside were the strongest force on the board after that and eventually carried the day to put Nakamura in the clear lead after three.

A couple former Wijk winners made advances in round four. Aronian happily pocketed a quick point against Nepomniachtchi's confusion in a Bf4 Grunfeld. Black is supposed to play ..Qb6 immediately after 8.Qxb7 and then the rook on a8 is inviolate. Not so after taking on d4 because c5 can push the black queen away. Aronian swapped down to two rooks and a knight vs a queen and Nepo resigned on move 26. Bad. Anand played a nice piece sac to get a big pawn roller against Wang Hao. He said it was leftover prep from his WCh match against Kramnik. The Chinese gave back two pieces for a rook but the bishop pair and passed pawns were more than enough for a comfy win that put Anand into a share of the lead. Nakamura held on to his share by holding a pawn-down endgame against Giri. Vachier-Lagrave added to Shirov's woes and joined Giri and Aronian at =2-5 on +1.

McShane leads the B with 3.5/4 and Italy's Daniele Vocaturo is leading the C with the same score.

Round 5: Kramnik will try to get into the event with white against Aronian. The other pairings: Smeets-Anand, Carlsen-l'Ami, Nakamura-Ponomariov, Vachier-Lagrave-Giri, Nepomniachtchi-Shirov, Wang Hao-Grischuk. Official site.

The name is new but the game is the same, and so is the mighty Wijk aan Zee chess extravaganza. The Indian company Tata Steel acquired the Corus Group in 2007 and it was inevitable this name change would come. Most of you probably remember when the event was named for Hoogovens, the Dutch company bought by Corus a decade ago. So it goes. They have kept it a Dutch event, however, with plenty of local players in every group. More importantly, they've kept it one of the premier events in strength and size, the giant 14-player field staying intact. And what a field it is.

Anand, Carlsen, Kramnik, Aronian, Grischuk, Nakamura, Nepomniachtchi, Ponomariov, Wang Hao, Shirov, Vachier-Lagrave, Giri, Smeets, l'Ami.

World #1 Carlsen is the defending champ and is coming off wins in London and Nanjing. Anand, who tied for first in London with Carlsen and McShane by traditional scoring also seems to be in good form. Last year he went undefeated but only got going late with two key wins over Shirov and Kramnik that rearranged the podium. Kramnik was in the hunt last year and tied for second with Shirov on +3. Nakamura is also back after his fine +2 showing last year and a 2010 that saw him rise to #10 on this year's list. (As predicted by Kramnik at Wijk last year.) The organizers must have been happy to see Nepomniachtchi beat Karjakin in the playoff for the Russian championship title since he was invited and the 2009 winner was not. The B and C groups are as formidable and fresh as always.

Two of the top favorites and former Wijk winners meet in the first round with Carlsen-Aronian. The rest of the round one pairings: Ponomariov-Anand, l'Ami-Giri, Smeets-Shirov, Nakamura-Grischuk (grudge match!), Vachier Lagrave-Wang Hao, Nepomniachtchi-Kramnik.

I'll be turning in a cameo with Peter Svidler on ICC Chess.FM bright and early at 7:30am NY for rounds one and two. The all-star crew after that is Seirawan, Benjamin, Christiansen, Yermolinsky, Har-Zvi, Illescas and, surprise, Loek van Wely, who won't be playing in Wijk aan Zee for the first time since his first appearance in 1992! Should be great stuff, especially after the low bar I always try to set to kick things off.

Well, here we are. I'm back home to the piles of snow and slush at last. My latest family health crisis seems to have had a happy ending (father, cancer, not a good year) with surgery last week and I'm feeling somewhat revitalized. Now to finish this damn book and get back to enjoying life.

What were the biggest and best stories of 2010? The most overhyped? The most overlooked? Best and/or most memorable game nominees? I've been so spotty at blogging this year that looking back over the Dirt archives isn't a useful way to peruse the highlights and lowlights. Hoping to do better in 2011, if that can count as a weak resolution.

Meanwhile, there are always these two running, or flying, around to keep me cheered up, exhausted, and on my toes.