Showing posts with label world chess championship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world chess championship. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Candidates Ends and It Will Be Gelfand vs Anand





I never would have predicted that Boris Gelfand would win the FIDE Candidates matches to decide the World Championship challenger.  He will now play Vishinathan Anand in 2012.  His final game against Grischuk may have been the best game of the entire Candidates cycle and it has already been widely annotated.  I will post additional links and video as it becomes available.

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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Anand - Topalov Webliography



Last week, Viswanathan Anand won the final game of the World Chess Championship against Veselin Topalov in Sofia, Romania, to retain his title.  The games in this championship were not error free, but they were always exciting and have rightly received a lot of commentary.  I have compiled links to annotations of all 12 games.  I will be adding more links in the coming days and welcome additions from readers.

Game One





Game Two
Anand - Topalov, Catalan (E04), 1-0





Game Three
Topalov - Anand, Slav (D17), 1/2-1/2





Game Four
Anand - Topalov, Catalan (E04), 1-0



Game Five
Topalov - Anand, Slav (D17), 1/2-1/2



Game Six
Anand - Topalov, Catalan (E04), 1/2-1/2



Game Seven
Anand - Topalov, Bogo-Indian (E00), 1/2-1/2



Game Eight




Game Nine
Anand - Topalov, Nimzo-Indian Defense (E53), 1/2-1/2




Game Ten




Game Eleven






Game Twelve
Topalov - Anand, Queen's Gambit Declined, Lasker Defense (D56), 0-1






The last game was most interesting to me as it may well revive interest in my favorite Lasker's Defense to the Queen's Gambit Declined.

Other commentary can be found at the official Anand - Topalov website, Convekta, as well as on ICC and ChessLectures.com (both of which require subscription). 
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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Anand Interviewed





With the ash from Iceland's volcano disrupting air travel and grounding Vishy Anand's flight, there is still some question whether or not he will make it to Sofia in time to play the World Championship match. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has posted a very informative interview with Anand in two parts.
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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Vasily Smyslov (1921-2010)

Former World Chess Champion Vasily Smyslov died Friday night at the Moscow hospital, having turned 89 on March 24th. There is a report and obituary at ChessBase and there will likely be many remembrances over the coming weeks.  Though he held the world title for only a short time (1957-1958), he was the best player in the world throughout the 1950s, during which he played a series of closely contested championship matches with Mikhail Botvinnik.  His best and most famous result was finishing first (two points ahead of the field!) at Zurich 1953, considered by many one of the greatest chess tournaments of all time and made immortal by David Bronstein's widely admired book.  His games have a positional character rather like that of Vladimir Kramnik today (who admired his play) and he often proved himself the Endgame Virtuoso, as demonstrated in his great book by that title.  His chess career continued to late in his life as he participated in the 1980s candidates matches (losing only to Kasparov in a match at Vilnius 1984), won the first senior championship in 1991, and last played in the Ladies vs Veterans tournaments through 2001.  I have looked closely at several of his late games in my series on A Black Fianchetto System in the Open Games and was very impressed by his play at such an advanced age.
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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Anand - Topalov Countdown

The World Chess Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Veselin Topalov begins in exactly a month, on April 23, in Sofia, Bulgaria.  Prematch predictions have tended to favor Topalov, if only because he is playing on his home turf -- as Vladimir Kramnik points out in a recent interview.

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Thursday, October 09, 2008

Kramnik Interview

There is a good interview with Vladimir Kramnik at ChessBase in anticipation of the World Championship match of next week. See the official site for a count-down clock: 4 days, 15 hours, 24 minutes at this writing. Get psyched with YouTube Video.
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Friday, October 03, 2008

Anand Interview

Der Spiegel did a wonderful interview with Chess World Champion Viswanathan Anand, which is translated and posted online at the ChessBase website. I found his reflections on the future of high level chess, given the impact of computers on the game, fascinating:
Ten years ago I said that 2010 would be the end, chess would be exhausted. But it is not true, chess will not die so quickly. There are still many rooms in the building which we have not yet entered. Will it happen in 2015? I don't think so. For every door the computers have closed they have opened a new one. ... Twenty years ago we were doing things that don't work today because of computers. We used to bluff our way through games, but today our opponents analyse them with a computer and recognize in a split second what we were up to. Computers do not fall for tricks. On the other hand we can undertake more complex preparation. In the past years there have been spectacular games that would not have been possible without computers. The possibility of playing certain moves would never have occurred to us. It is similar to astrophysics: their work may not be as romantic as in previous times, but they would never have progressed so far with paper and pencil.
Anand's championship match with Kramnik starts October 12 and will be held in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.
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