Tactics Time at the Sinquefield Cup

In round one of the Sinquefield Cup, Sergey Karjakin smashed Peter Svidler. In his recap for the Internet Chess Club, GM Ronen Har-Zvi spotted an incredible tactic that COULD have occurred. Here's the position, with White to move:
Take a look at see if you can work it out. I was able to spot the relevant ideas, but couldn't put them all together. I really enjoyed this combination, and hope you do as well. You can follow along with the video from the correct time here.

Master Class

Today in the sixth round of the Altibox Norway Tournament in Stavanger, Levon Aronian smashed Vladimir Kramnik. I recommend playing through the game once yourself. Just give it a casual run through if you don't have a lot of energy. And then watch Peter Svidler's recap of the game. I'll embed the video here, but the video is on YouTube if you want to watch it on your TV instead.



Svidler's recap is pretty much a master class. I'm particularly struck by the section from the 6:30 to 8:24. The analysis flows quickly in the more tactical phase of the game, and I'm not going to pretend I caught all of it, especially in my current brain-dead state. But I'm going to go back to this again a couple of times this week - it's just that good. It's just over 22 minutes long, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

Insider Theory

Today on Twitter, not-quite-our-own Theo Slade had a very interesting exchange with Peter Svidler about opening theory. (@polborta is Svidler's personal twitter account.)

@theosladechess In topical lines in particular, top players independently look at the same positions in great depth, resulting in a pool 1/

— Peter Svidler (@polborta) November 16, 2016

@theosladechess ... of shared knowledge which has not yet been shown in practice, creating a kind of 'insider theory'. Official theory is 2/

— Peter Svidler (@polborta) November 16, 2016

@theosladechess ...stuff that has already been seen in published games, and is therefore openly available to everyone.

— Peter Svidler (@polborta) November 16, 2016

@polborta existed. So would that mean that, eg, Black shouldn't go 9...d5 for fear of "insider theory," or is it more a case of Carlsen 2

— Theo (@theosladechess) November 16, 2016

@theosladechess That's a lot harder to say, requires levels of speculation I am not happy with, sorry. Both are possible.

— Peter Svidler (@polborta) November 16, 2016

Apologies for formatting issues, but I think that's easy enough to follow.

One can come up for many reasons for Svidler to defer further comment, too. Ultimately, anything he says could be construed as giving away information to potential competitors about what he does and doesn't know, or may or may not know. Although choosing what to believe of anything he says after that last tweet would become a poker problem, and not a chess problem, if that makes any sense. (And it may not. I am sick at the moment, and I'm not sure that my brain cells have survived the illness, or if having survived they still function with a reasonable modicum of coherence.)

Tournament Players PROTIP: Mikhail Tal edition

Given that the Tal Memorial Tournament is currently going on in Moscow, it seems fitting to dedicate an edition of Tournament Players PROTIPS to The Great One hisownself. With no further ado, here's a collection of Tal's best PROTIPS:

1. You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.
2. In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively, simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language.
3. If you wait for luck to turn up, life becomes very boring.
4. Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without any errors, or as they say a 'flawless game', is colorless.
5. Quiet moves often make a stronger impression than a wild combination with heavy sacrifices.
6. Fischer is Fischer, but a knight is a knight!*
7. If (Black) is going for victory, he is practically forced to allow his opponent to get some kind of well-known positional advantage.
8. I go over many games collections and pick up something from the style of each player.
9. For pleasure you can read the games collections of Andersson and Chigorin, but for benefit you should study Tarrasch, Keres and Bronstein.
10. I like to grasp the initiative and not give my opponent peace of mind.
11. Drink your coffee only when it is your opponent's move!

And finally, this gem:

Journalist:   It might be inconvenient to interrupt our profound discussion and change the subject slightly, but I would like to know whether extraneous, abstract thoughts ever enter your head while playing a game?

Tal:   Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.

And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanović Chukovsky: "Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".

I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder.

After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.

And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice.

— Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.

 * Decades later Peter Svidler would add to this, "A pawn is a pawn." Later still, either Svidler or Jan Gustaffson extended this to, "Two pawns are two pawns." Chess wisdom is extended a little further each year!

"They are trying to convince me to play the French. With Black... "

"... There are some really weird people out there" - Peter Svidler, a.k.a. @polborta

pic.twitter.com/k98LTNo2kJ

— Dan (@AntonSquaredMe) September 17, 2016

Assorted whatnot

First, a partial translation, courtesy of Chess24.com, of an interview Peter Svidler gave to sportsdaily.ru after the Candidates. Somewhat interesting if you're a Svidler fan, with hints of the pessimism that some feel holds him back.

Second, a ChessBase article on that video everyone is talking about concerning chess ratings over time. In fact, I may as well embed the video, as everyone else has.


The article establishes who created the video in the first place. It also explains what EDO is, which some of the earlier articles on the video did NOT do. It's disappointing ChessBase didn't mention Chessmetrics, though, especially given that they used to get publish a fair number of articles from the Chessmetrics creator, Jeff Sonas. You can learn more about EDO Historical Chess Ratings at the EDO site, maintained by EDO creator Ron Edwards. It has the advantage over Chessmetrics in that it has been kept current, and I will add it to the blog roll later today. Still, the article is worth a read as Edwards explains some of the weaknesses of the approach when rating earlier players.

Finally, a problem, because why not? I don't have a source for the following problem, other than that it was submitted to the ICC ProblemBot by user Stormline.

White to move and win

It's Sergey

Sergey Karjakin won the Moscow Candidates Tournament today, and will face Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship, allegedly in November, allegedly in NYC.

Today Karjakin faced co-leader Fabiano Caruana. Due to the tie-break rules, Caruana needed to either draw (with the black pieces) and hope that Anand won with the black pieces against Svidler, or he needed to beat Karjakin outright. Caruana played a Sicilian and tried hard to create something, but ultimately had to resign not long after the time control was reached. Karjakin played brilliantly in time pressure to secure the win.

So congratulations to Sergey Karjakin for his excellent result, and consolations for Fabiano Caruana, who faced a daunting task today thanks to the tie-break rules.These events should really be settled with a mini-match, but FIDE either can't or won't find the sponsors to do it. C'est la vie.

Grandmaster Instruction

Mark Crowther, of The Week In Chess fame, has been stating on Twitter that the last couple of years he felt like his understanding of the game has improved simply by watching top grandmasters go over their games in press conferences after rounds. I sympathize with this point of view, although it is hard to know exactly how much understanding translates into improved play, much less improved results. (If everyone you play is getting better at the same rate you are, you might not see any improvement at all!)

For example, I found it helpful to watch Vladimir Kramnik (yes, my favorite player) go over his game today. Kramnik is very fast and spews lots of lines (you can see Svidler struggling to keep up at times), but it is interesting to see what he's looking at, both positionally and tactically. Today he took on Naroditsky. The commentary is below, for those interested.

[I'm having trouble getting the video to embed. The link is below. The clip with Kramnik should be the second clip on the page.]

LINK

Coverage courtesy of Chess24.com & Livestream.com.

Note that Livestream classifies this as Sports/Extreme Sports! I had no idea an ironing board was involved....

An interesting interview with Svidler & Karjakin

Peter Svidler and Sergey Karjakin have given an interview to 64, the Russian chess & draughts magazine, about their match in the finals of the recent World Cup. Vladimir Barsky conducted the interviews and Chess24.com has provided a translation of the first part of the article. If you're interested in current events, this is a worthwhile read.

FIDE World Cup Coverage

The FIDE World Cup is coming to a close. Peter Svidler and Sergey Karjakin reached the finals and thus qualified for the 2016 Candidates Tournament to determine Magnus Carlsen's next Challenger. In that sense, the two of them have accomplished the missions they had set out for themselves.

But it's still good to win a tournament, and the winner gets an extra $40,000 in prize money ($120,000 vs $80,000) for his efforts. So that's the motivation for winning the four game match (plus tie breakers, if needed) at the end of the event.

For those not following it, Svidler won the first two games, so he only needed a draw in today's game to win the match. Unfortunately, nerves got the better of him and he lost in horrible fashion.

I bring all this up because Dennis Monokroussos has provided a great piece of analysis on today's game. You can find that on his blog, The Chess Mind, here. He does a great job describing the psychology of the game as well as the variations. The meat of it is in the analysis that you can find at a link at the bottom of his post.

And for live coverage of tomorrow's final regulation game, chess out Chess24.com.