The seventh edition of the Edmonton International Chess Festival is one of only two annual competitions in Western Canada that offers international norms opportunities. The competition took in the Edmonton Chess Club and consisted of round robin with ten players, including one celebrity, former world championship finalist Nigel Short.
Besides playing in the tournament GM Short also conducted an open-to-all
lecture
at the ECC on the day before the tournament started
We challenge our readers to identify the game Nigel is discussing, and tell
us how they
found it (hint: it's a game from 1990, and was between two world champion challengers)
The Short lecture was followed by a simul by US Women's Champion IM Irina
Krush
Players of the main event: IM Leon Piasetski, GM Anton Kovalyov, FM Vladimir
Pechenkin,
GM Nigel Short, IM Irina Krush, GM Victor Mikhalevski, NM Robert Gardner, IM
Edward Porper
The first round started with a shocker: the top seed played a brave attacking game against a player almost 200 points his junior on the Elo scale, but missed the correct continuation and lost.
GM Victor Mikhalevski of Israel pondering his 22nd move against Nigel Short
in round one
After this disaster Nigel won his next four games, and then drew with white against the talented Ms Krush. After one more draw in round eight the top seed finished the tournament two points ahead of the field.
Actually, since the 3-1-0 soccer scoring system was employed, the final table shows him three points ahead of his nearest rival in the official standings:
Which brings us to our second challenge question: in how many different
countries has
Nigel Short won a tournament (hint: the British GM is going after a Guinness
record)
You can win a copy of Fritz 13 signed by Garry Kasparov if you correctly answer the two questions: which game is Nigel commenting, in how many different countries has he won a tournament (first, equal first, including weekends). Use the feedback button on the left of the page and make the subject of your message "Nigel Short quiz". If there are multiple correct solutions the winner will be determined by lots. Incidentally the answer to the second question was given to us by Garry, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of these things.
Photos by Vlad Rekhson/Ali Razzaq
LinksYou can also use ChessBase 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs to replay the games in PGN. You can also download our free Playchess client, which will in addition give you immediate access to the chess server Playchess.com. |
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