Dortmund Final: Adams emerges victorious

The Dortmund GM tournament is a ten-player round robin with six international stars and four German grandmasters. Top seed is Italian GM Fabiano Caruana, rated 2796 and ranked number three in the world, while "local boy" former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, who has won this event no less than ten times (Caruana won it last year).

Final report

Andrejkin, Dmitri - Leko, Peter ½-½
Andrejkin repeated the line that Leko has defended multiple times. This game followed closely the Topalov-Aronian Nimzo from the Norway Masters tournament in May. That game was a draw, and here too Leko had no problems at all holding to half a point.

Naiditsch, Arkadij - Khenkin, Igor 1-0
Naiditsch played a precise and crushing game today against Khenkin. He emerged better from the opening and never let his opponent back in the game. The combination of queenside and kingside pressure was simply too much for his opponent to handle. Black's only plus was a protected passed pawn, but it was so tightly guarded with the strong blockade on d4 that it never played a role.

Wang Hao - Meier, Georg 1-0
Wang Hao played another unambitious opening that was to his liking. It isn't entirely clear where Meier lost his way but eventually, around move 40, White obtained a pleasant advantage with his pair of bishops giving Black too many problems in holding his structure. The Chinese player kept pressing his advantage forward, but he committed a grave mistake with 57.Be6? Black could have replied 57...Kf6! when White's win would have been far from easy, instead he played the lesser move 57...Bd6 and Wang Hao from then on converted gracefully.

Adams, Michael - Kramnik, Vladimir ½-½
Kramnik showed that he was in a fighting spirit today, not only opening with a Sicilian but following it up with a potentially hyper-accelerated dragon. Adams was in no mood for such foolishness and he used a clever move order to force Kramnik into a little known c3 Sicilian. As soon as move ten Adams was able to force Kramnik to repeat moves or lose the game, and with that Adams takes the tournament.

Caruana, Fabiano - Fridman, Daniel 1-0
This game is very hard to describe. Fridman chose a variation that gives White a piece for two pawns, but it is not so easy from a practical point of view to convert this material advantage. What happened in the game was both players playing relatively planless for the majority of the game. The game seemed to be going just fine for Black who secured another pawn along the way. However his king was somewhat shaky and needed consistent attention. White's attack with his powerful knights eventually broke through and forced Black to exchange into a lost endgame, in which White's rook was much more powerful than Black's three passed pawns.

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Standings

Dortmund 2013 – Schedule, pairings and results

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Born in 1975 in Tuapse on the shores of the Black Sea, Vladimir Kramnik studied at the Botvinnik-Kasparov chess school. At 16 he was included in the Russian Olympiad team and scored a sensational 8.5/9, the best result at the Olympiad. After that followed a string of great tournament results, culminating in a world championship challenge. In 2000 Kramnik played the chess legend Garry Kasparov and beat him to take the title, which he successfully defended in 2004 against Peter Leko and 2006 against FIDE champion Veselin Topalov, whom he defeated to take the unified world championship title.

On this DVD Vladimir Kramnik retraces his career from talented schoolboy to World Champion in 2006. With humour and charm he describes his first successes, what it meant to be part of the Russian Gold Medal team at the Olympiad, and how he undertook the Herculean task of beating his former mentor and teacher Garry Kasparov. Kramnik dissects his wins against Leko and Topalov, giving us a vivid impression of the super-dramatic final games of the 2006 match. His commentary is full of useful advice and provides a fascinating insight into the thought processes that govern top level play.

The DVD contains more than six hours of video with narrative and game analysis. There are also five additional segments from an exclusive video interview on the intrigues that surrounded the 2006 world championship, and on the state of the chess world in general.

Vladmir Kramnik:
MY PATH TO THE TOP

• ChessMedia format
• on DVD-ROM
• Video running time: 6 hrs
• Language: English
• EAN 4027975004990
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• Review by Prof. Nagesh Havanur
• Review by Albert Silver
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