You can stop following Jinky Young's results in U-10 tournaments for signs of genius. The DNA test performed on Bobby Fischer's remains have ruled out his paternity of the nine-year-old Filipino girl. This likely deals a fatal blow to her mother's chances of getting a piece of Fischer's estate, rumored to be worth whatever the media pulls out of its collective ass on any given day. ChessBase has news clippings and links up here.

I suppose they have to eventually decide on a recipient, no? Would it default to the Icelandic government otherwise? They could use a few bucks. Ms. Watai, Fischer's (apparently somewhat unofficial) Japanese wife, would be my pick. They cared about each other for a non-trivial amount of time and it would sort of keep it in the chess family since she's the president of the Japanese Federation. Maybe they could use it to establish a non-profit chess promotion foundation of some sort, or just give it to the ADL.

Speaking of, and though I'm sure it's far beyond the purview of the court, they could probably use Fischer's DNA to prove his own paternity, which, last I heard, was only anecdotally shown to belong to Paul Nemenyi and not Gerhard Fischer. Nemenyi probably has enough family around to get a produce a statistically significant match. Or at least to disprove, which is easier. Even a comparison with the DNA of Fischer's sister's kids (who are currently trying to get his estate) might be enough for that.

Well, RIP Bobby. Again. For now.

Today was Fritz Saemisch Day in Amsterdam and Ljubo used 22 minutes on move 8 and 47 minutes on move 10 and flamed out without a fight against Howell. Bizarre, especially considering how good he looked yesterday most of the way against Nakamura. We're used to him blowing up in time trouble, but usually it starts at move 35 or so and not move 15. Crazy.

Here's a video of how Loek van Wely handled his rook endgame against Nakamura: http://j.mp/crLDVf.

[Okay, that's a tiny bit unfair, as Nakamura defended with his usual stubbornness and accuracy, but still.]

Hmm, how is that durned rook endgame not winning somewhere? GM Joel was actually much more enthusiastic about White's position before he swapped down to the rook endgame, and it appears he was on to something. White was obviously much better, but it's looking like 30..a6 was an ingenious shot to force exchanges and get great saving chances. How slippery is Nakamura? Like a greased weasel wearing teflon sneakers.

It's worth wondering if Hikaru Nakamura is just bored by any game of chess that leaves him with more than one minute on his clock. Today in the first round of the NH Tournament in Amsteram, which pits the Rising Stars team of young players against an Experience team of no longer young players, Nakamura was, for the first time in my memory, in actual time trouble. The only real old-timer left in the event, 59-year-old Yugoslav legend Ljubo Ljubojevic, dared Nakamura to take on an offbeat line of the Accelerated Dragon. The American declined the gauntlet -- 6.Nxc6 bxc6 7.e5 Ng8 8.Bc4 Bg7 9.Qf3 looks hideous for Black, but after 9..f5 10.Bf4 e6 he controls the key squares long enough to organize his defense. Nakamura took a few minutes to instead play quietly with 6.Nb3, leading to normal Dragon lines -- at least if Black continues with ..d6 at some point.

Which, like any good Accelerated player, Ljubo did not. Some nice maneuvering of his heavy pieces on the back rank allowed him to reach the promised land of every Acc.Drag player, getting in ..d5 in one move instead of two. The position was about equal by this point according to Joel Benjamin on Chess.FM, and Black had plenty of activity to compensate for his isolated d-pawn (in a Dragon, really). More surprisingly -- everyone knows Ljubo can still play a 2700 game when he's in the mood and rested -- the clocks were about even as Nakamura spent his lead trying to find ways to play for a win against the lowest-rated player in the field. I kept warning the audience about Ljubojevic's tragic habit of getting good positions and then imploding in time trouble, but as move 30 passed it was Nakamura who was down to a few minutes while the veteran had a those and a few more.

But there are few players in the world as good as Nakamura at finding dynamic chances and we saw that again here in the last 10 moves. The idea of creating a passer on queenside looks desperate at first, but Black couldn't find any way to break through on the kingside despite his powerfully placed pieces. It slowly, well, quickly since they were both down to a few minutes, became clear that White's threats were stronger and Black had to find a way to deal with the a-pawn. This way, as Yoda would put it, Ljubojevic did not find. Instead he collapsed under the pressure, blundering with 36..b4?? missing 38.Rb8 and the game is over. White was already clearly better by that point. 31..Be3 looks like the last best chance to hold the balance. Earlier, we looked at 29..Re2 as a an interesting try. Nakamura mopped up with his customary precision to notch the first win of the event. He made his last few moves with a dozen or so seconds left on his clock. Perhaps the set of bullet games he played on the ICC before the round weren't such a bad idea!

That was wild, but not nearly as wild as Caruana-van Wely. Let the record show that it looked to all the world like van Wely simply blundered a pawn in the opening, missing a double attack with Qh5 that would have cost him his knight on a5. He regrouped to get enough counterplay to hold on with good defensive play. Then things got very sharp again and a spectacularly unusual repetition draw suddenly appeared with mate threats on both sides. Great stuff.

Gelfand outplayed Howell in a difficult queen and pawn endgame. If anything will push the 19-year-old Englishman to skip a career in chess, games like this one might have as much to do with his decision as the possibility of dying poor.

The official site is doing its usual excellent job of putting up round reports under the direction of Dirk Jan, so I won't duplicate efforts too much this week. I will be tweeting occasionally, however. Macauley Peterson is there for the ICC and the organizers, so we can also expect great video material from him and the ChessVibes crew.

And by 'grind' I mean coffee and lots of it -- big and black like my television. Yes, I'm here again. My one-month sabbatical from the Dirt has been slightly truncated by my receiving an offer I couldn't refuse from Chess.FM to go on the air for the NH Tournament in Amsterdam, starting tomorrow (Thursday) at 1330 local and 7:30am EDT. Yes, seven thirty in the morning, which is where that coffee comes in. And the defib paddles. That's around the time I've been going to sleep since coming back from vacation on the West Coast, so this is going to take some getting used to.

The Rising Stars youth team member with the best score gets an invitation to next year's edition of the legendary Melody Amber rapid/blindfold tournament. The NH itself is no walk in the park. It's a much stronger event this year and it will be even better if top Star player Hikaru Nakamura doesn't get leprosy and have a finger fall off when he bangs the clock. Nakamura was horribly ill at last year's event and that, combined with a solid performance from eventual winner Jan Smeets, kept the American from a much-anticipated clash with the super-elites at fast time controls in Nice. (Little-known story: One of Pillsbury's syphilitic fingers fell off during a crucial game against Lasker. Cool as he was, Lasker picked up the finger and smoked it right there at the board.)

Nakamura is joined on the Rising Stars youth team by a veritable who's who of who's young and highly rated. (Little-known fact: "The Young and the Highly Rated" was a popular soap opera in the USSR, following the hijinks of two teenage Grandmasters.) Caruana, Giri, So, and Howell have all had impressive results to go along with their impressive Elo. To match this squad, the Veterans have continued last year's trend of poaching healthy-if-paunchy middle-aged Grandmasters still enjoying life on the sunny side of 2700. This shift from grandpas to dads resulted in a rare win for the Veteran team last year. Svidler and Nielsen are back again, and they brought reinforcements. World Cup winner Boris Gelfand, enjoying a renaissance at 41, is now the top seed. Loek van Wely is there and then a real veteran, Ljubo Ljubojevic, now the only player in the event born before the Summer of Love. Fun and fact-filled bios of the players at the official site.

Joel Benjamin, Alex Yermolinsky, Jan Gustafsson, and Larry Christiansen are your Chess.FM analysts for the first half of the event. Sounds like a party I'd like to be invited to, so I'm glad I was. Hot topics for the slow game days: Joel, is Omar Minaya your Facebook friend? Jan, 100 years from now how will we remember Coolio? Larry, why don't we just open the borders completely? Yermo, is it wrong to talk about the USSR as "the good old days?" Should be fun. Those should beat the quality of my usual chess trivia questions, which have gotten thinner than Christina Aguilera's wardrobe. ("SafeSearch is off." Well, duh.)

I figured Dortmund would be as boring as usual this year so it was a good time to take my first real break. Oops on that one. That and I'm up to my bloodshot eyeballs in the FIDE election every day, which leaves me somewhat disinclined to rehash it all here. Especially since these days you need to run everything from a press release to a trivia question to 1.d4 by a lawyer before you post it. I'll be glad when the Lausanne verdict comes down because I've got a month's worth of muck to rake. (Well-known fact: working with lawyers usually isn't fun, even for other lawyers.)

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.

After a few days pass it's hard to work up the gumption to post, especially when I feel out of the loop. I've been dragged into the Karpov2010 campaign more and more with Garry (consider this full disclosure), not to mention my other jobs and, of course, the World Cup. (AR-GEN-TINA!) Unfortunately, this is going on with some very interesting chess taking place.

Ivanchuk won his fourth Capablanca tournament in La Habana, finishing a point clear of Nepomniachtchi with an impressive +4 undefeated score. Dominguez and Short finished with +1 Alekseev and Bruzon both had disastrous -4 showings, both failing to win a game. Ivanchuk was clearly the class of the event, but Nepomniachtchi played the highlight reel game, hammering Short with the black pieces while dumping a bagful of exclams on the board. The computer sez White can actually hold with the comically blase retreat 25.Bd4, but that's not really much of a point.

Magnus Carlsen has also put up a +4 score and still has two rounds to improve on that in the Kings tournament in Medias, Romania. ("medias" means "socks" in Argentine Spanish, which is amusing in my sleep-deprived state.) Carlsen was cruising along with draws for the early rounds but woke up to win four in a row. His 6/8 is a point better than Gelfand and two better than Radjabov. Underdog Nisipeanu has done the local fans proud by battling to a -1 score with a couple of wins. Ponomariov has lost two games on the white side of the Samisch KID, continuing what my memory tells me is a recent history of trouble dealing with Benoni and KID tactics. He is kept out of the cellar by Wang Yue, whose rating again climbed up to the top ten. This despite having zero wins against 2700+ opposition in the last year.

Uh-oh, time for all those film projects about Fischer to get into rewrite. Maybe they can add a new zombie angle. As reported widely and here in the NY Times chess blog, the Icelandic Supreme Court has ordered Fischer's body be exhumed for DNA testing to prove or disprove paternity of the nine-year-old daughter in the Philippines he is assumed to have fathered. This is all about the fate of Fischer's sizable estate. Anyone know the status of his various copyrights? He let so many things lapse that I wonder if whoever eventually controls his estate will be able to benefit from book sales, however small.

It's all rather ghastly, if not uncommon in this day and age. It's a little surprising they couldn't come up with anything to get a sample from since he spent many of his last days in the hospital. Hey, while they're at it, maybe they can test some more people to determine Fischer's own paternity. The circumstantial case for Paul Nemenyi is quite strong. Where is he buried, by the way? Anyone got a shovel? Just asking.

I admit I wasn't paying any attention this this Vegas Chess Festival at all until my homeboy Arthur Kogan Facebooked the final round win that gave him a share of second. Clear first is a rarity in these short opens, but Timur Gareev of Uzbekistan pulled it off with class by taking out leader Akobian in the final round in an overpowering tactical effort. PGN after the jump. [Standardized to Gareev.]

Sorry for all the quick hits. Swamped. Along with my usual three jobs, I'm helping coordinate Garry's world tour on behalf of the Karpov2010 campaign. Between him and Karpov himself it's a full-board attack. Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Puerto Rico, several destinations in Africa and then it's on to open the Asian front. Wild. And a new member of the Karpov Advisory Board is going to be speaking with the crown prince in the UAE in a few days, which could get interesting. I'll wrap Bologan and Karjakin winning Poikovsky as soon as I can, and oh god Bazna just started with Carlsen, Radjabov, and Gelfand. Zoinks!