A Quick (-chess) Recap

I was exhausted at the end of Badalona, so I had my doubts as to whether I’d actually play in the rapid tournament in Poble Nou. Even after the three days in-between, I was still a bit tired, but I decided that a rapid tournament wouldn’t take too much more out of me. As added motivation, I needed at least one rapid tournament to qualify for the overall Catalan Circuit prizes (combined total from 5 events).

Like the previous category-A tournaments on the Circuit, this one featured Lazaro Bruzon at the top of the list and a host of Cuban IMs and GMs behind him. It was a 10-round swiss at a time control of G/25 (no increment or delay). There were 7 GMs and 14 IMs playing, as well as a dozen WGMs, FMs, etc.

Even though I was playing way down, the first round was actually a bit of an adventure. The tournament started at 10 AM, and while I had woken up in time, my brain was lagging a bit behind. I thus decided to try and completely avoid his attack by entering an endgame, but the endgame promised me few objective chances as it was tough to find any active idea. However, he finally made a mistake and I ended up winning. Round 2 was a much smoother affair, as I outplayed my opponent from start to finish.

With 2/2, I was white against IM Vladimir Bukal Jr. in round 3. We reached the following random position after 13…d7xe6:

(FEN: rn2k2r/pbp1b1pp/1p2pn2/8/2PP4/P2B2P1/1PQNN1qP/R1B1KR2 w Qkq - 0 14)

With a G/25 time control, there is the opportunity to think a few times during the game. This was one of those moments for me. The thing is that I need to move my knight on d2, but moving it to b3 (to prepare Bf4/g5 and 0-0-0) allows Ng4xh2, when Black has a nasty check on f3 after the Rf1 moves.

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Tiger Style

This is a bit late, but I only just got back from Germany and didn’t have much internet access in my hotel rooms.

About a week after Balaguer finished, I went to Mainz for the Chess Tigers Mainz Chess Classic 2008, a huge chess festival that draws close to a 1,000 players to the city over 7 days. I had spent the interim period in Munich (4+ days) and Frankfurt (2+ days), and then took an S-bahn train to Mainz.

Situated on the Rhine River, Mainz is the capital of the German Rhineland-Palatinate state and has a long history. Unfortunately, I did not get to see much of Mainz, but on the plus side, I did get to play in a pair of strong chess tournaments. The tournament website is at: http://www.chesstigers.de/ccm8.php?lang=1

FiNet Chess960 Open

The first tournament on the docket for me was the FiNet Chess960 Open. A rapid event, the games are played at a rate of 20 minutes for each player, with 5 seconds added per move. The twist is that it’s Chess960, and so the starting position is randomly selected from the 960 possible arrangements of the pieces on the back rank (there are only 960 positions because the rules do not allow positions where both rooks are on the same side of the king).

The tournament was played over 2 days, with 5 rounds on the first day and 6 rounds on the second day. This can make for a somewhat tiring event, as even though it’s rapid chess, each game can easily take 30-40 minutes, and then that is repeated a number of times each day. Even in the so-called rapid World Championship in which Anand, Carlsen, Morozevich, and Polgar participated, it looked like by the last games of each day, Anand was not calculating nearly as well as at the beginning.

Anyways, in the FiNet Open, I was seeded number 41 of about 232 players at the start of the event. The first day, I lost to GM Rustam Kasimjanov (2004 FIDE World Champion) in horrible fashion, dropping a center pawn for absolutely no compensation after less than 10 moves. This was my only loss of the day, leaving me with 4/5 going into the second day. I started off with a loss to GM Evgeny Bareev (former super-GM, and second of ex-World Champion Vladimir Kramnik in multiple matches) in a long, hard-fought game. The disappointing thing with this game was that I had a worse position, fought back, and then blundered horribly at the end to throw all my hard work away. Again I beat up on the lower rated (at least at regular chess) players, and then faced GM Pavel Tregubov (a former European Champion) with the white pieces. I played enterprisingly in the opening, sacrificing a pawn for good compensation, but then I began to play poorly, miscalculating lines at every move. Tregubov finished me off with a nice queen sacrifice to set up a mating net.

I beat a lower rated player again, and then finished the tournament off with a smooth win over GM Murtas Kazhgalayev. Thus, I finished with 8.0/11, good enough for a tie for 9th through 18th place, with my mathematical tiebreaks being good enough for 16th place overall. GM Hikaru Nakamura won the event on tiebreaks with 9.0/11, although he should have won the event in sole first had he not thrown away a drawn endgame against GM Arkadij Naiditsch in round 10. Naiditsch then returned the favor, throwing away a complete win against Motylev (up a queen!) and blundering into checkmate in the last round.

Ordix Open

After the end of FiNet Chess960 tournament, the Ordix Open began the following day. The time control was the same (G/20 + 5 sec/move), but with the standard starting position. Some of the players had been joking during the FiNet tournament whether the organizers could randomly select Position 518 from the list (which corresponded to the regular starting position) – now we got a chance to play 11 rounds of that.

The first game was a bit weird, as I had gotten more used to playing with my pieces in their non-standard starting squares over the previous couple days. However, I beat all the lower rateds until I was paired up in round 4 with GM Hikaru Nakamura, the favorite (at least in the eyes of most people I talked to) in the event. With the white pieces, we played a very long game that ended in a draw, although I really should have won the game. The game was a bit of a see-saw at first, with neither playing getting a winning advantage, but then in the rook and pawn endgame, I steadily outplayed him to get a won position. However, I then erred a little bit, and then in the final position with only one move to win, I didn’t see how to proceed and took his draw offer.

That game can be replayed here. After the first day, then, I was sitting on 4.5/5.

The second day, I started off with a tough loss to GM Davit Arutinian. I then won a pair of games before getting clobbered by GM Tomas Markowski of Poland. Like my game with Kasimjanov, this was a very disappointing game because I essentially did not put up a fight. After the opening 12 moves or so, I was just clearly worse having lost a central pawn for little compensation. Markowski then managed to put me away, leaving me on 6.5/9. Had I won the game, for example, I would have been in contention for first place with 7.5/9.

Over the last two games, I managed to get back on track, beating WGM Anita Gara and GM Robert Ruck of Hungary, the win against Ruck being particularly nice. And so, after 2 more long days of chess, I finished with 8.5/11, good enough for a tie for 12^th through 24^th place, with my mathematical tiebreaks being good enough for 19^th place.

The Ordix Open was won by Ian Nepomniachtchi and Pavel Eljanov on 9.5/11, with Nepo’s tiebreaks being better. Nakamura finished with 9.0/11 after losing a won game against GM Zoltan Almasi in the tenth round. However, he still managed to win first place overall in the combined score list (with 18.0/22 across the two events).

GrenkeLeasing Rapid “World Championship”

After the end of the normal open tournaments each day, the crème de la crème fought it out in the evening. Billed as the Rapid World Championship, it’s not officially sanctioned, so I think it’s a bit disingenuous to call it as such. Still they always get some of the strongest players in the world to play, and this year was no different. It started as a double round-robin with Anand, Carlsen, Morozevich, and Polgar. The top two finishers would then play a 4-game match for 1st/2nd place, and the remaining two would play for 3rd/4th place.

Anand finished ahead in the round-robin phase, beating Morozevich twice and then drawing with everyone else. Carlsen took second in the round-robin, and so faced Anand in the final stage. However, he got completely crushed in the first game (foolishly playing the Sicilian Dragon again) and lost the second in poor fashion after playing a very insipid Catalan. After missing a ton of opportunities, Morozevich finally beat Polgar in their match. Surprisingly (or not), Polgar went through 10 games without a single win.

The chess was somewhat disappointing, with everyone except for Anand looking particularly mortal. Carlsen’s opening play never really got him much; Morozevich did not quite seem on form, missing some tactical lines that I would have expected him to normally see; and Polgar just looked completely outclassed.

Watching the players, though, was somewhat more interesting. Anand plays without showing too much emotion, although he does fidget around a little bit during all phases of the game. Polgar and Morozevich were rather stoic, although Morozevich would show his disappointment with his play more often. Carlsen was the most interesting to watch, because it almost didn’t look like he was playing a game. He would often look at the other board during the game (even on his own move), would sit in a much more relaxed fashion than any of the other players, and so on. The only time he looked a bit distressed was after losing the first two games of the final to Anand. In those cases, he ran off the stage to a side door.

ChessBase had a final report on the Biel 2008 tournament, with some amusing photos of Carlsen. Here they are, along with a link to the ChessBase article. He was doing the same sort of stuff in Mainz.

It’s too bad you never see such events in the US – from the champions tournaments, to the massive turnouts in the open events (with such strong fields), to the packed spectators area for the evening matches, it was lots of fun. I definitely plan on returning next year.