Saturday, December 15, 2007

Kamsky Leads Shirov 2-1

U.S. GM Gata Kamsky today drew the third game of his championship match against GM Alexei Shirov (now of Spain) in the FIDE World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. He has White in the final game (barring tie breaks). The winner of this match will play Topalov for the right to challenge for the 2009 World Championship against the winner of the expected Anand-Kramnik match.

Kamsky won the second game of the match yesterday. That second game was a very interesting and closely-contested encounter that featured attacks and counter-attacks by both sides and will likely attract much high level commentary. Several sources have already provided extensive annotations to the game, and I will try to add others as they appear:

Updated at 11:00 Sunday-- thanks for the corrections and additional links.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Small correction, winner of this match will play Veselin Topalov in some sort of semifinal, to finally challenge winner of Kramnik-Anand in 2009.

Chessdom has live text commentary on the games. It started with Kamsky-Adly in round one etc. For people who speak Russian, chesspro.ru will be the top choice.

Michael Goeller said...

Thanks for the correction and the link, Goran! I have always found it difficult sorting out FIDE's world championship plans....
:-)

Anonymous said...

The official tournament site also posts extensive commentary (by Shipov):

http://www.ugra-chess.ru/eng/main_e.htm

Michael Goeller said...

Thanks for the notes: I have updated my post to include them, along with the result of today's game, just announced.

Tim said...

... and Gata drew comfortably today to win the match! A great performance by the comeback kid. I hope we see a lot more of him in the coming decade.