A Positional Lesson from Gelfand/Rubinstein

Now, Where Was I? Oh, yes, there was that small matter of a World Championship match -- in Moscow, of all places. The July 2012 issue of Europe Echecs featured game seven of the match annotated by GM Gelfand. That was, as we all know, the game he won. There are several positions I could use for instruction, but I chose the position shown in the diagram.

Gelfand - Anand, 2012 Match, g.7

After 15...Qd8-b8

Gelfand gave Anand's last move '!?' and (translating from the French) commented,

A strategically risky solution. After 15...Bf4, Black would have practically equalized. [...] Black has placed White before a complex choice : either attack with 16.Bxf6 leaving Black the Bishop pair and control of the center, or follow a line of play against the 'weak' Queenside Bishop with 16.Bg3. I decided for the second solution which is closer to my chess thinking, much influenced by the examples of Rubinstein, my favorite player from the past.

The Israeli grandmaster chose 16.Bg3, which he also assigned '!?', and discussed 16.Bxf6!? in a note which concluded that 'White keeps a dangerous initiative'. The game continued 16...Rc8 17.Qe2 Bxg3 18.hxg3. Here Gelfand gave a long note without any concrete variations. He wrote,

In this position the engine gives advantage to White. That's why numerous commentators have evaluated it badly. Despite the apparent simplicity, Black must defend with precision against several strategic ideas for White:

- double the Rooks on the c-file;
- introduce the Nf3 on e5;
- attack with the Pawns on the Queenside by a3 and b4;
- attempt to activate the Kingside with the advance of the Pawns f4 and g4-g5.

The Bishop on b7 plays a considerable role in the problems confronting Black. It remains out of play for the entire game, which will lead to defeat! Other than that, playing for the attack by recapturing 18.fxg3 is not convincing because it ruins the structure of the White Pawns, without giving any real chances.

Black played 18...Qd6, where Gelfand gave another long note showing why 18...Rc7 is inadequate. Chess is so much more than the calculation of variations. To play through the complete game, see Boris Gelfand vs Viswanathan Anand, World Chess Championship 2012 (g.7) on Chessgames.com.

Catching Up with Chess News

Even though I don't cover chess news on this blog, I still take a keen interest in it. I follow Chessbase, Chessdom, and Chessvibes almost daily through their RSS feeds, and at least once a week I look at the sites to make sure I haven't overlooked anything. Catching up after a vacation is never a trivial task, and as I mentioned in Now, Where Was I?, is always a priority.

The best single source of unbiased news is undoubtedly Mark Crowther's The Week in Chess, where his weekly 'Introduction' is the best summary of the weeks' activities available anywhere. Let's look at the intros for the past month or so.

2012-06-18: TWIC 919

Magnus Carlsen again won the Tal Memorial after a thrilling final round. Fabiano Caruana was leading by half a point and only needed a draw to take the title. Caruana got caught out in the opening and in spite of Aronian's struggles with his own form he was defeated. After Radjabov drew with Hikaru Nakamura the winner of the game between Carlsen and Luke McShane would take the title. McShane had an excellent tournament after losses in the first two rounds but he went seriously wrong in time trouble and Carlsen won and took the title. The event contained a lot of fighting chess, quite a lot of time trouble and all viewable with commentary in Russian and English.

I have to say the Russians now have shown us all how presentation of top class tournaments should look if money is practically no object. I for one have learned a lot from watching the players on video, nevermind the commentary, which in the case of this event the English one was by Ian Rogers and was both informative and instructive.

Anatoly Karpov defeated Yasser Seirawan in the blitz portion of their match which somewhat surprised me as Karpov's clock handling has been poor for years and Yasser suddenly decided to join him and that alone I believe cost him the match. In fact live coverage of chess events in general has shown that almost anything is possible if you have an opponent who thinks he can make lots of moves in only seconds. I would also suggest Alexander Grischuk find time to watch the archive of his play in the Tal Memorial and watch himself dump about 2 points through incomprehensible clock handling.

The Russian Championship Higher League is as usual pretty strong and Peter Svidler plays David Navara in Prague this week but we learned there will be no Kings tournament in Medias due to the economy. I can't be the only one who is thinking that the loss of a tournament might be the least of our worries as this economic crisis shows no sign of ending.

2012-06-25: TWIC 920

This week was much quieter than many recent weeks. The cancellation of the Kings tournament in Bazna has left a bit of a hole. It left the Cez Trophy taking the headlines with Peter Svidler beating David Navara 3-1 in an interesting match. The Russian Higher League is a deep field of very strong players, the leadings players Ian Nepomniachtchi and Dmitry Jakovenko are well off the pace with a couple of rounds to go.

Of special interest in the same number was '8) FIDE Women's Grand Prix Kazan 2012', because I need to add the event to my page on the 2011-2012 FIDE Women's Grand Prix.

The 4th Women's Grand Prix took place in Kazan 9th-23rd June 2012. Anna Muzychuk and Indian player Humpy Koneru shared first on 7.5/11. According to the regulations of Grand Prix in the case of any tie in any tournament, the Grand Prix ranking points and prize money are split equally. Women's World Chess Champion Hou Yifan was the top seed and finished half a point back on 7 points after defeating long time leader Elina Danielian who lost her last three games. Hou finished level with Viktorija Cmilyte. This was a recovery for Hou. She had travelled directly from a very tough Danzhou tournament where she finished last and not surprisingly had a rough start to the tournament.

2012-07-02: TWIC 921

The Russia vs China Match leads thing off this week with Dmitry Jakovenko being Russia's top player. However both he and Ian Nepomniachtchi had failed in the Higher League competition earlier in the week. The best Russians will all be in Astana later in the week to play in the World Rapid and Blitz starring Magnus Carlsen who extended his lead in the July FIDE rating list released this week. The Higher League saw Dmitry Andreikin, long time leader 16 year old Daniil Dubov (lost to Alekseev in the final round) and Nikita Vitiugov all finished on 7.5 points. The 40th Greek Team Championship sees the in form Fabiano Caruana, Gata Kamsky, Judit Polgar and David Navara star. There is however plenty of other chess to look at too.

2012-07-09: TWIC 922

The Astana World Rapid and Blitz Championship has been very interesting so far. Magnus Carlsen (who will now play the Biel tournament starting on the 22nd July after being recruited at the last minute following the collapse of the Kings tournament) looked a certain winner of the rapid event after two days but, not for the first time, he had a sudden decline in his form. Not than the winner Sergey Karjakin's score was anything other than huge. The blitz tournament is being led by Alexander Grischuk.

I'm not sure that 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move is anyone's idea of a perfect blitz time control if you at least want to see some chess. Personally if you want a classic blitz shootout then 5 minutes and no increment would be better. If you want a lot better standard of blitz chess then 5 minutes plus 10 seconds per move is the one. 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move is the worst of all worlds for me. Nevertheless I have pretty much no complaints about the coverage, video, a commentary in 2 languages and good gamescores and it has proved entertaining. I always get caught out, suddenly the summer season of professional and amateur chess is upon us. I've got a good selection of what I hope are the stronger tournaments.

2012-07-16: TWIC 923

So much chess this week. Alexander Grischuk won the World Blitz, Dortmund, Science Park Amsterdam events are on now as are team and international opens. Details of the FIDE Grand Prix's announced. A marathon session, I need to go to bed!

While the World Rapid and Blitz Championships look like natural additions to my World Championship site (see the sidebar for a link), I'm going to pass for now. I'm sure Wikipedia will take up the slack.

Been There with Al Horowitz

Continuing with Now, Where Was I?, I did a similar exercise for converting my About.com material, previously outlined in Been There, But Haven't Done That. First I took note of where I'd left off before vacation...

• 2012-05-21: Chess Quizzes for Beginners
• 2012-05-28: Tiebreaks & Quizzes
• 2012-06-04: Quizzes for Notation, Setup, and Moves
• 2012-06-11: Quizzes for Check and Checkmate

...Then I looked at the remaining projects in Haven't Done That. The next few projects fall into two categories: game viewers & glossary. After wondering if there was any real interest in the game viewers, I checked my stats for the two sets of conversions that I had already done:-

• Chess Traps : View Full Games
• Classic Chess : View 64 Great Games

Although the counts for individual games were nothing to boast about, the totals over all games were encouraging, especially for the traps. While looking at the numbers I noticed that there was a third set of games that weren't linked from anything else:-

• Opening Repertoire : View Example Games

A little more snooping revealed that this was the same I.A.Horowitz project scheduled next for Haven't Done That, already converted more than three years ago and recorded in Opening Repertoire : Example Games on this blog. For some reason, I had never included it in my index pages. I added it to Learn to Play Chess, along with a related article.

Now, Where Was I?

The first blog post after annual vacation is never easy; see 2011's Moving on after Vacation for a summary of the reasons why. This year I took a full month off, an unusually long time by my standards, but with the intention of blogging at half-speed or so. Unfortunately, reality didn't match plans. For the first two weeks I had time to write, but a very poor Internet connection. For the second two weeks, I had a great Internet connection, but little time to write. Was Caissa trying to tell me something?

When I finally returned home, my first task was to recall what interested me back in mid-June. Following is a list of posts that might merit a follow-up. It excludes ongoing series like Flickr Friday -- last seen in Paul Morphy, 1837-1884, one of the few vacation posts I managed to finish -- which are relatively easy to pick up where I left off.

• 2012-06-14: Gelfand's World Championship Career; the Anand - Gelfand match
• 2012-06-12: Olympiad Size Politics; Ali Nihat Yazici
• 2012-06-11: Quizzes for Check and Checkmate; the About.com series
• 2012-05-22: Unusual 1.e4 Responses According to Khalifman; also 2012-05-29: Losing with Alekhine's
• 2012-05-17: The Man Who Put Chess on Television; Shelby Lyman
• 2012-05-10: Time Enough for Taimanov; Sicilian ...e6
• 2012-05-08: International Chess Journalists & CJA
• 2012-05-06: A Chess Popularity Contest; Wikipedia's WikiProject Chess/Popular pages
• 2012-05-03: Learn from Your Draws
• 2012-03-25: FIDE/ECU Chess in Schools; also 2012-06-03: 'Politicians Who Know Nothing about Chess Know...'
• 2012-03-20: Chess Informant Endgames; a subject worthy of a new blog?

Why the gap in April? I was also on vacation for half of that month, with the same challenges as now. Having put this summary together, I think I'll spend some time catching up on chess news. Whatever happened with the Ali Nihat Yazici story? How about Shelby Lyman and the 40th anniversary of the start of the match that transformed chess?

The Biggest Open in the World

The US Chess Scoop on the 2012 World Open (3:03) • 'Features tournament winners GMs Ivan Sokolov (the champ on tiebreak) and four-time US Chess Champion Alexander Shabalov.'

Shabalov: 'Of course it's exciting. It's the World Open, the biggest open in the world.' The blurb also tells us,

We also talked to GMs Yury Shulman, Sam Shankland, US Women's Champion Irina Krush, James Black, and norm-earner Luke-Harmon Vellotti. Extreme Chess Champ Elliott Liu also has a special message for Marc Arnold, who earned a GM norm.

Official site: World Open Chess Tournament.

Capablanca Signs His Feet

Vacation continues and, as in 'Sand Is Included', about the only thing I've had time to work on is Top eBay Chess Items by Price. Of the items I had to choose from, the most unusual was 'Cleveland Public Library Chess Collection Catalog - 2 volumes' (dated 1964), which sold for US $1,200. Unfortunately, the associated image was completely uninspiring, especially to someone with a vacation mindset.

I chose instead an item titled '1935 Original SIGNED Photo Capablanca Chess Champion player visit CUBAN CLUB', pictured below. Originally listed for '$1800.00 or Best Offer', it sold for US $800, which I imagine was 'Best Offer'.

The description added,

Genuine 1935 photo of the Cuban world master Capablanca signed dedicated in La Habana Cuba. One [On?] visit to the Cuban chess club. Note on the photo is present also a frame of Capablanca on the wall playing chess. Great photo! Unique piece and extremely rare. Size 5 x 7 inches. Gelantin silver. Excellent condition. A very rare piece and unique, from a private collection of photos about Capablanca.

Capablanca is seated center. The start of his signature is located on his feet.

***

Later: The same photo appeared on Edward Winter's Chesshistory.com: 7727. Capablanca photograph (the link points to '7726. Botvinnik and the musicians', so just scroll down; that's the way Winter's links work), with a request for more information.

Paul Morphy, 1837-1884

The photo's caption says,

Chess master and prominent Louisiana lawyer. He is one of the two people who ever memorized the complete Louisiana book of codes and laws. As you can see fans still bring chess pieces from time to time to leave at his tomb.

The inscriptions on the tomb list the occupants and their life spans. Chess player Paul is listed first. Why is the list headed 'A.D. 1817', twenty years before the birth of the first occupant?

Paul Morphy © Flickr user cliff1066 under Creative Commons.

Another page, Paul Morphy’s Grave, shows a well known postcard picturing the tomb, 'topped by a likeness of a chess knight', although it appears to be a misidentification. Morphy's real tomb looks more like the second in line behind the 'chess knight'. For more about Morphy’s death, see Batgirl's Paul Morphy: The Endgame.