April 2011 Archives

Can we start talking Candidates Matches? First off, capital "C" in candidates or not? Second, apostrophe in "candidates'" or not? We have kids' menus and ladies' rooms, right? Ahem. So take your Strunk, your Funk, and take a hike, punk, because we're here to talk chess. You know, like we always do here. Mostly. Sometimes.

The entirely superfluous candidates matches of 2010 2011 are finally upon us, taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan Kazan, Russia as scheduled six months later than planned. Official site. Only the corruptness and incompetence of Ilyumzhinov's FIDE could finally give Vishy Anand a year off from what was turning into a world championship match marathon, and for that we thank them. No, wait, we don't. Creating a world championship qualification event out of thin air against the published rules just to have a tasty plum to give out in an election year (adding an organizer wildcard for extra sugar) is just good old-fashioned leadership. And hey, some of the announced 500,000 euro prize fund will probably even go to the players.

But we're supposed to ignore this latest example of why even the chess world championship -- especially the chess world championship -- is a political joke designed to scare off legit sponsorship and just talk about the chess, so let's get to it. The official site sez May 3, but that's for arrival and then there's the mandatory onslaught of folk dancing at the opening ceremony on the 4th. The games actually begin on the 5th at 7am EDT. Kazan is the capital of the region of Tatarstan and is also known for illegal music downloads and that Disney movie with Shaquille O'Neal as a genie. But srsly folks, I'm sure every reporter who isn't watching Will and Kate walk to their carriage on the backs of 400 contiguous peasants will be there to cover this important event. If Kazan goes well we can dream of holding our next big event someplace even less yaktastic. No! I kid! Really, it's lovely. Been there. Nice train ride. Book your summer vacation tours now.

In the run-up to these matches the biggest two stories have been 1) Magnus Carlsen dropping out and 2) Danailov saying Topalov will refuse to face a Russian opponent on Russian soil. Those are both better than, say, 3) "Mamedyarov and Topalov accuse each other of cheating and agree to settle things with a duel, eyebrows at ten paces." Topalov can't meet a Russian player until the final since Kramnik and Grischuk are in the other bracket, but it's not an unreasonable forecast since Topalov and Kramnik are favorites. Ironically, Topalov's first-round opponent, newly re-crowned US champ Gata Kamsky, is a Russian Tatar and could be considered the real hometown player in the group. I recommend that Kamsky insist they play outside in a field and piss on a tree to avoid the old cables in the ceiling gambit. My other suggestion is for him to take Sebastien Feller as a second and watch Danailov's head explode.

Let the bracketology begin. Top half winner faces bottom half winner.

Winner of 1) Topalov-Kamsky plays winner of 2) Mamedyarov-Gelfand
Winner of 3) Aronian-Grischuk plays winner of 4) Kramnik-Radjabov

If, in order to protect your sanity, your brain has purged the details from your mind, the first two sets of matches are just four games long, plus tiebreaks. There are no rest days during the matches, but there are two rest days between match rounds. The final is six games with a rest day in the middle.

First the usual disclaimers and caveats about how in a match this short, anything can happen. Done. Topalov has to be the favorite against Kamsky, who made the professional decision to collect $40,000 at the US Ch instead of resting/preparing for Topalov. They played a longer and rather terrible candidates match in 2009, dominated by a still-unconvincing Topalov 4.5-2.5. Kamsky continues to impress by how well he does on sheer talent against his opening handicap against the top 20. Still, a player of his match experience and grit can never be taken lightly and if he survives the openings against Topalov he might solve the organizer's concerns about the Bulgarian boycotting the final. As for Topalov, he's played so rarely of late it's hard to say what to expect. Losing to Anand seemed to take the wind from his sails and he hasn't played a classical event since his mediocre Pearl Spring appearance (4.5/10) way back in October. If he's on his game only Kramnik and Aronian are threats to him. I love Topalov's chess and would love to see him playing his best again, but of course I'm rooting for the Brighton Beach Bomber.

Mamedyarov-Gelfand has B-side written all over it, I'm afraid. Wildcard Mamedyarov is a serial underachiever at the elite level while Gelfand is overachieving consistently while only rarely nailing the big guys. Their recent database score in classical chess is 3-1 Gelfand, all four games decisive and won by white. Both players should be very well rested; like Topalov they've been mostly inactive this year. In a short match I'll take Gelfand's experience over Mamedyarov's energy, but it's really a toss-up.

I'd be happy to watch the other two matches go for twenty games. What great match-ups! Aronian-Grischuk pairs two of the most creative players of this generation. Aronian has a clear edge in strength and results, and usually on preparation, but Grischuk has very high peaks when he's on form. They've swapped wins several times in the past few years with the exciting games you would expect. Grischuk tanked pretty badly in Wijk aan Zee while Aronian cruised, but that was three months ago and the only event for either of them since then was Amber.

Kramnik-Radjabov is a wonderful clash of styles. The methodical majesty of the former world champion versus the scrappy chaos of the former wunderkind. I'm surprised at how rarely they've met; their last classical encounter was at Wijk way back in 2008. Big Vlad is the heavyweight in this entire event and everyone knows it. He has more match experience than all the other players combined according to my wild ass guess department. (Kamsky's up there.) But he was unrecognizable at Amber and merely good for most of 2010. Motivation can be an issue for him and I hope he'll be up for this event big time. He's not the invincible Kramnik of old, but he has an aura that will stay in place in Kazan until someone makes him tip his king. Radjabov has turned into the elite game's most unpredictable counter-puncher. He slacks off for a game or two and then can play with wild abandon.

There's an even split in the ages between the elders and the younger set. Gelfand is 42, Kamsky and Topalov 36, Kramnik 35. Aronian is 28, Grischuk 27, Mamedyarov 26, Radjabov 24. Yow, seeing the "youngsters" Aronian and Grischuk at 28 and 27 is a little depressing. Okay, now I'm definitely rooting for Gelfand. He's one of just eight players born in the 1960s left in the top 100. (Nigel Short, born in 1965, is the oldest player in the top 100.)

Predictions in KOs are for fools, so here I go: Topalov beats Gelfand, Aronian beats Kramnik, and in the final Aronian beats Topalov to challenge Anand! Sure, if I were betting the baby food and playing it safe I'd say Kramnik all the way, but this is consequence free and it's more fun to pick an upset and dream of what would surely be a dazzling world championship match with a new set of storylines. And it would be nice to get a next-gen guy in there before Carlsen decides take off the skinny jeans and put on his man pants and take over.

If this isn't enough match play for you, Hikaru Nakamura is playing Ruslan Ponomariov in a special ten-game challenge match in Saint Louis starting on May 17. (That's the first of the two free days before the candidates final, which is nice.) Six classical games followed by four rapid, should be a great match between two of the hardest fighters in the sport. (Impress me by finding a top player with a higher move average in drawn games with white, one of my odd-but-effective fighting chess metrics. Pono's is 44, Nakamura's 45. Topalov and Grischuk, other well-known fighters, also hit 45.) St. Louis Chess Club resident GM Ben Finegold will play a match against 80-year-old Viktor Korchnoi at the same time.

I'm not sure why this is news. Surely Armenia isn't the first country to make chess compulsory in schools.

Armenia is to make chess a compulsory subject in primary schools in an attempt to turn itself into a global force in the game, the education ministry said on Friday. "Teaching chess in schools will create a solid basis for the country to become a chess superpower," an official at the ministry, Arman Aivazian, told AFP.

The authorities led by President Serzh Sarkisian, an enthusiastic supporter of the game, have committed around $1.5 million (one million euros) to the scheme -- a large sum in the impoverished but chess-mad country. Children from the age of six will learn chess as a separate subject on the curriculum for two hours a week. Aivazian said the lessons which start later this year would "foster schoolchildren's intellectual development" and teach them to "think flexibly and wisely".

The game is hugely popular in Armenia, where grandmasters are stars and important match results make headline news. The country of 3.2 million people...

It mentions Aronian and that Armenia won the Olympiad in 2006 and 2008, which seems pretty superpowerish to me. Isn't it somehow redundant to formally put chess in the curriculum in a chess-crazy country like Armenia? It's like making skiing compulsory in Norway or making bacon compulsory in America. Oh, it is, right.

This page is a nice summary of studies and research papers on chess in schools and its impact on development and achievement. There's the usual correlation vs causation problem in most of these studies, of course. Societies really don't like doing serious compulsory experiments on kids, for mostly obvious reasons, so it's hard to do rigorous double-blind experiments with the control groups and random selection needed to produce good science. Plus, the people guiding the experiments are often chess people with a strong desire for the results to come out with a positive spin for chess.

None of this is to say that chess can't improve reasoning or reading scores or discipline -- I believe it can -- but it's also hard to say that kids who are motivated enough to stick with a chess program aren't also motivated enough to improve in other ways relative to kids who don't stick with chess. (E.g. most kids who regularly work on music or painting also have better reading scores than kids who don't.) Patience and focus are increasingly shown to be the determining success factors in (American) school environments. Chess both teaches and rewards these characteristics. One of my favorite statistics in recent years is the one that showed the highest correlation between standardized tests at the high school level and college GPA was not the test scores themselves but how long the students took on each question. More time, better future GPA. Work matters.

The recent book Nurtureshock, while rather pop-y in that conveniently superficial Gladwellian way, and despite the "how do we write the next "Freakanomics?" title, is a great overview of the state of science (and lack of science) in education and early learning. Their discussions about what we really don't know are often more illuminating than those about what we do know. You might recognize the author's name. Bronson's The Nudist on the Late Shift was a good piece on the dotcom/tech culture. He's a keen observer. I strongly recommend Nurtureshock to anyone interested in early education or anyone with or around small kids. It genuinely had an impact on my own parenting and how my wife and I look at schooling environments for our kids.

The US has a top ten player for the first time since Kamsky 1.0, but Hikaru Nakamura is only in St. Louis as a spectator. With the two-time champ out of the picture, Kamsky 2.0 (2.5?) is the top seed in this year's US Championship. He's also defending his title, come though it did after a four-way tie for first, three rapid playoff games, and a draw on the black side of an armageddon blitz game against Yuri Shulman. (Yeah, I had to look that up. Interesting format, yes. Memorable having the title go to a drawn armageddon blitz game, not so much.) The rest of America's Got Talent is on hand as well, including Onischuk and a surprise wildcard who holds more US titles than anyone else in the field -- or anyone living other than Walter Browne -- Yasser Seirawan!

Well, that sounded good, but actually Shabalov also has four titles and is also playing. But it's still a pleasant surprise to see Yaz in action on US soil. Since moving to the Netherlands years ago he's played only slightly more than Reshevsky, who has the excuse of being dead. Seirawan actually enters as the third seed at 2636. He plays a few Dutch league games every year, crossing swords with the likes of Houben and van Kerkhof, whose names may not even be household names in their own households. (According to my database, the 2200 van Kerkhof even had the temerity to beat Seirawan when they met last year. The nerve.) Seirawan did beat GM Werle in a nice game a few months ago, and we'll soon see what a few games per year for eight years does to your chess.

Or maybe we won't, depending on how this unusual format plays out. Two groups of eight play round-robin style to determine four semifinalists for match play. As we've seen in the past, from US championships to Dortmund, small groups can provide very conservative chess, the way a slow pack of distance runners just try to keep each other in sight. This would seem to be even more the case with two qualifiers from each group, since a single rabbit starting with two or three wins doesn't mean everyone has play aggressively to catch up. There's no real advantage to finishing first in your group, other than the $2000 bonus, which is nothing to sneeze at but nothing to risk qualification over. Many early draws usually lead to more draws since losing one game probably puts you out of contention. But things can get wild if there are a flurry of decisive games at the start, since the losers know they have a very short time to claw back to a plus. Let's hope for the latter. The info page doesn't explain how the tiebreaks work for the group phase, which will almost surely be relevant. Nor does the page mention move minimums or other anti-short-draw rules, but I assume they are again in effect.

There are youngsters in each group as well, with Robson, Hess, Shankland, and Naroditsky hoping to shock the usual suspects. Should be great. It also highlights that there are really only two "prime" American chessplayers at the moment, age-wise. Nakamura is obviously one, at 23, but there's only a single player in the entire field between 19 and 35, Akobian at 27, a remarkable gap. 35 is hardly over the hill, of course, as Kamsky, Shulman, and Onischuk continue to show, but Nakamura is going to feel pretty lonely in around five years unless at least a couple of the four teen dreams continue as professionals. I hope they get the support to at least make it a possibility. The first prize is a massive $40,000, one of the largest purses in chess to my knowledge. The total prize fund is $166,000. Kudos once more to the Saint Louis club and its primary benefactor, Rex Sinquefield.

Play begins Friday at 2pm local (CDT), 3pm New York. Live here or on the ICC, of course. Will you be able to follow the games on mobile devices this year? iPad, iPhone, Android? The inability of millions of iPeople to follow live chess from an official site is a tragicomedy of the tech backwater chess habitually occupies. Since I have Flash on my Nexus S running Android I can usually get a DGT/Toma board, though sizing it manually is annoying and replaying a game by hitting the miniaturized buttons is laborious at best. Why isn't there a simple mobile live viewer in HTML5? Did I miss it? iPhone users don't even get Flash. There is an ICC app though; how's that for watching pro events? They should offer a free version just for viewing with chat and a paid version that blocks all the twits who shout "blunder!" at super GMs after every other move because their chess programs changed their evals by 0.63.

The US Women's Ch runs concurrently, with Zatonskih and defending champ Krush as the heavy favorites. They have won the last five titles between them.

An inauspicious start for my trip to Florida with Garry. This sushi place is at the JetBlue terminal in JFK.

Still one blitz spot left in Kasparov's exhibition in Naples, Florida, on Thursday! One competitor, an FM no less, is coming all the way from Montreal for two blitz games against Kasparov he'll be able to tell his grandchildren about. The event takes place at the spectacular Collier Automotive Museum, which is usually closed to the public. For more info and to contact the organizers, see the full invitation on ChessBase here.

It's official. There will be no Linares supertournament this year. They are hoping to have it in the second half of March next year. The usual economic woes are cited. Spain is in terrible shape overall, but the tournament has been struggling for years, dependent on an intricate maze of mostly public financing. Meanwhile, Dortmund just announced their dates, July 21-31, so that's some good news even if expected. The Russian Team Ch starts soon, that's always mighty. Then the US Championship and then the Candidates. What else?

I've just been informed that Larry Parr has passed away in Malaysia. He was an impressive figure, though I don't think we ever met beyond exchanging piles of message board posts and emails. I corresponded with him regularly during the Karpov campaign last year, in which he was very active, and didn't know he had fallen ill. Abd Hamid Majid sends:

It is with sadness that I inform friends and associates that Mr Larry Parr former editor of ChessLife and co author of Dato' Tan Chin Nam's autobiography 'Never Say I Assume' and other chess books passed away after a short illness in Kuala Lumpur. He passed away this morning @ 6:52am on 2nd April 2011.

His family, Samboon Parr (wife), Christiana Parr (daughter) and Ian Parr
(son) were with him the last month in Subang Jaya Medical Center and University Hospital.
Larry was born in Seattle, USA, studied in Washington University, and the last few years was working with Dato' Tan Chin Nam in Malaysia.

His last article for ChessLife on GM Larry Evans was published in the March 2011 issue.

Larry Christiansen had better take good care of himself next year.

A lot of jockeying has left a pack of three players tied for first at the European Championship with impressive 8/10 scores, including our hero, Vladimir Potkin. Wojtaszek and Polgar are the other leaders. One benefit of all the ups and downs is that the leaders haven't faced each other yet, setting up a nice brace of matches for today's final round in Aix-les-Bains. Potkin-Polgar is the headliner, with the winner guaranteed a share of first. Wojtaszek gets Svidler, the top-rated of the ten players on 7.5 and who has won two in a row. Sebastian Feller, the young French player recently punished for cheating at the Olympiad, is also on 7.5. Any word on the ground on how he's being treated by his peers? Doesn't seem to have affected his concentration much.

Wojtaszek, Potkin, and Polgar nosed into the lead with clutch wins in the penultimate round. Luke McShane also won to move to 7.5 in a wild game. I'm using his game with Zherebukh to do ChessBase's April 1 advertising blitz one better with my innovative idea for capturing more reader eyeballs for ads. The problem with banners is how easy they are to ignore. Not so with these. The two ads you see at two tenths of a second are good, but it's the one your conscious brain can't see at two hundredths of a second that the advertisers will really go for. The concentration chess readers put into looking at a diagram makes them particularly susceptible to subliminal impression.

Black is ready to win with ..Qb1+, so White's good move is also his only move. And if you feel an urge to buy the new Britney Spears album after figuring it out, don't hold it against me.