Linares 4: All games drawn, one with a fight

Linares Round 4

Three more games, three more draws. We did have have one game of chess today thanks to Veselin Topalov and Teimour Radjabov. It's not that we think chessplayers should be paid by the move, but things are getting a bit ridiculous with these short draws. Maybe they should adjust a player's prize money or appearance fee according to the length of his draws.

Maurice Ashley's "no draws before move 50" rule Generation Chess event was a success by any way you measure it, but hasn't found followers. It's not about more decisive games or more aggressive play; it's about giving the fans and sponsors their money's worth of chess.

Today Vallejo-Shirov went 20 moves and Kramnik-Leko lasted 18. You would think that Kramnik would be interested in testing his future match rival. You would be wrong. If this was a prelude to their 14-game match scheduled for September they'll be able to add Ambien as a sponsor along with Danneman.

Leave it to the Battling Bulgarian to stand up for all that is good and right and allow the Sveshnikov instead of going into a turgid anti line. (See Kasparov-Radjabov and Kramnik-Leko for those.) 72% of games in those closed lines at Master level finish drawn. The Sveshnikov? Under 50%.

For his efforts Topalov was rewarded with a strong pull out of the opening and the fans were rewarded with an exciting game of chess. From the fact that Radjabov played this game up till move 18 last year we can assume that he believed in his defensive chances despite dangerous-looking d-pawn.

Diagram: Topalov-Radjabov after 37.Kf3

Topalov gave up a knight to safeguard his king and to gain a passed pawn on the seventh rank. Radjabov had things under control however and forced the draw with little trouble. Black was even nominally better, but even had Radjabov kept material on the board with 37...Rb7 instead of swapping down with 37...b3 it would have been hard to prevent the eventual liquidation of all the queenside pawns and a simple draw.

Monday brings the show of shows, the #1 vs #2, the 13th vs the 14th, K vs K, great predecessor vs great successor: Kasparov-Kramnik. Will this be the first decisive result between them since Astana 2001? Will we have any more decisive games in Linares at all? Will Kramnik play a game of more than 30 moves? Don't miss our live Radio ChessBase coverage at Playchess.com!

Pictures from round four

This was going to be the roughest game of the day

Vallejo vs Shirov. Come on, Alexei, 4.Ba4 is perfectly normal in the Ruy Lopez

We are going to see a lot more of this later in the year

In a daring effort to spruce thing up and hold public interest the players are being forced to use these "artistic" chess pieces in the remaining rounds.

The theory is that these pieces will create a lot of nervous aggression in the players and there will be consequently less draws in this tournament. Of course we are just kidding, but what else are you going to do?

All results so far