World Cup 5.2: Tomashevsky, Kramnik advance

The FIDE World Cup is a knockout, starting with 128 players, with two games (90 min for 40 moves + 30 min for the rest, with 30 seconds increment) between pairs of players. The tiebreaks consist of two rapid games (25 min + 10 sec), then two accelerated games (10 min + 10 sec), and finally an Armageddon. The winner and the runner-up of the World Cup 2013 will qualify for the Candidates Tournament of the next World Championship cycle. The venue is the city of Tromsø, which lies in the northern-most region of Norway, almost 400 km inside the Arctic Circle. You can find all details and links to many ChessBase articles on Tromsø here. The World Cup starts on Sunday, August 11th and lasts until September 3rd (tiebreaks, closing ceremony). Each round lasts three days, while the final will consist of four classical games. Thursday August 29 is a free day. A detailed schedule can be found here.

Some of the players concentrate pre-game different then others. Some walk around, and some meditate over the board for a few minutes before the game starts.

Round five game two

Anton Korobov had excellent chances against Vladimir Kramnik despite being out-prepared from the opening. Black's position was quite good but the Russian decided that some simplifications were in order to obtain an opposite colored bishop endgame with rooks on the board. However he underestimated how powerful these bishops coupled with the rooks and the better structure could become, and Korobov slowly but surely built a winning advantage. However due to a couple of inaccuracies and sheer tenacity from the ex-World Champion Black was able to hold the position, almost miraculously, and advance to the semi-finals.

Svidler checks out the games of potential opponents like a hawk

Dimitri Andreikin's (standing) Caro-Kann maybe didn't solve all of his opening problems directly, but it was sufficient to equalize in the long run and the players agreed to a draw on move 20 in which the chances were roughly equal.

Gata Kamsky (with the white pieces) came to the game with one result in mind: victory. He avoided Evgeny Tomashevsky's preparation in the Marshall, but the second was insistent on sacrificing a pawn regardless! White's extra pawn came at a dangerous prize as his pawn structure in front of his king was shattered. In mutual time pressure Kamsky retained his extra pawn, but with a slightly vulnerable king and a passed h-pawn that Tomashevsky was running down the board it became difficult to play. The American blundered by thinking he could stop this pawn with the king, when in fact the sacrifice of this pawn, done by promoting it, lifted any protection that the king might have had and it fell into a mating net that cost white his queen, the game and the spot in the semi-final.

Tomashevsky attributes his good results by focusing on playing 'for fun' and not pressuring himself into thinking about results.

The players were very gracious in their postmortem commentary with the commentators, here the host of the show Nigel Short and Fabiano Caruana

Fabiano Caruana and Vachier-Lagrave (notating his latest move) had an interesting game in which White had slight positional advantages but were never enough to put Black in real danger. The players fought hard but when they ran out of real resources they agreed to a draw.

All results of the fifth round games

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All pictures provided by Nastja Karlovich

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN: R1 – R2 – R3 – R4 – R5 The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.