LCC-R4: You've just been spacebarred

You've just been spacebarred

Round four report from London by John Saunders

With one round to go (starting at 2pm on Sunday), the Classic is nicely poised with five of the six players still able to finish first. Round four featured just the one decisive result, with Hikaru Nakamura beating Mickey Adams, which makes the scores as follows: Kramnik and Giri 6, Nakamura 5, Anand and Adams 4, Caruana 3.

One of the great things about an international chess tournament is the exchange of ideas between people from different countries and cultures. From the beginning, the London Chess Classic has placed a great deal of importance on invitees putting in as positive a performance in the commentary room as they do at the board. Top chessplayers are highly intelligent people and have quickly realised that their livelihood depends as much on their ability to communicate as to play good moves.

Consequently we now have a young generation of players with the confidence to innovate off the board linguistically as well as on it. Not just those who have English as their first language, either. It’s gratifying for us native Brits to have our language adopted worldwide as the first language of chess, but perhaps a bit scary too. As with our other notable export, football, where we have had to learn to endure other countries playing it a lot better than we do, we now have to live with people from non-English speaking countries being more articulate and creative in English than we are.

Anish Giri is a very personable, confident young man who is fluent in a number of languages. On stage he converses with the chief arbiter Albert Vasse in Dutch, with Vlad Kramnik in Russian and with the rest of us in fluent English. Like other super-GMs he likes to use English in a creative, playful way. I am reminded of our own Jon Speelman, former Candidate and one-time world number four, who also enjoys coining whimsical words in a chess context. For example, in Speelspeak, ‘zugzwang’ becomes ‘Volkswagen’ (don’t ask me why); and he and other English titled players will say something like ‘Re4 is box here’. In this context, ‘box’ is a reference to the Informator symbol that looks like a box and means ‘forced’.

Now we have a younger generation of super-GMs whose cultural references derive from ChessBase rather than Informator. Consequently you might hear the likes of Hikaru Nakamura and Anish Giri using the word ‘spacebar’ as a noun or verb: “I thought I can spacebar you in this, but apparently I can’t do it either… so what to do?” Here ‘to spacebar’ means something like ‘to play the analysis engine's first choice move’. I have noticed, by the way, that one or two new moves in the tournament corresponded to Houdini’s first move, indicating that players are being influenced by the analysis engine’s recommendations in the opening. I guess this is nothing new but perhaps becoming more prevalent.

An Italian job well done

One nice human story got us off to a good start in round four. Two Italian boys had travelled all the way from Italy to see their hero, Fabiano Caruana, yesterday, and eagerly sought his autograph.

Not only did they get it, but TD Malcolm Pein was able to arrange...

... for them to make the ceremonial move on Fabiano’s board.

Fabiano was Black in the game so they actually made Vlad Kramnik’s move against him. They chose 1.d4. Asked by Malcolm whether he was happy for the move to stand, Vlad smiled and said that he was. And so say all of us, for the simple reason that 1.d4 eliminates the possibility of the Berlin Defence. So well done, those two little Italian boys, and I’m glad to add that 1.d4 also appeared on the other two boards, and indeed the fourth game of the Jones-Edouard match.

Kramnik-Caruana was drawn after 35 moves. The chief interest came in a carefully-calculated temporary sacrifice by Black to secure an extra pawn, but it was played more to ensure equality. White was able to exchange down to a drawn endgame quite quickly. At the post-mortem Fabiano, now the only player out of the running for first prize, sounded a little despondent: “Since the first round I've played pretty dull games”. He is perhaps a little over-chessed at the moment. One imagines he will come back stronger in 2015 and will soon rediscover the form he showed in the middle part of 2014.

“We liked your play, Vishy... at least, up to a point” was Nigel Short’s greeting to the 15th world champion in the commentary room after his game against Anish Giri. I wonder if Nigel meant this in the Evelyn Waugh sense. In Waugh’s satirical novel Scoop, there is a character called Lord Copper who is a newspaper magnate. One of his editors, when agreeing with him, tends to say “definitely, Lord Copper” – but when disagreeing with him, can only bring himself to say “up to a point, Lord Copper”. So, I wonder, did Nigel really like Vishy’s play.

The game began with a Queen’s Gambit Accepted, specifically a line where White gives up a pawn to get an initiative. White achieved this objective but it never quite looked as though anything tangible would come of it. But it was quite an interesting game nonetheless.

Mickey Adams was in trouble from quite soon after the start of his game with Hikaru Nakamura. He steered for a rook endgame a pawn down, with pawns all on the same side of the board, but a further inaccuracy cost him dear. He has faded after a strong start in the tournament but still has a chance of the top prize. Meanwhile Hikaru Nakamura has bounced back well from his earlier defeat at the hands of Kramnik and, with the benefit of the 3-1-0 scoring system, can yet leapfrog over the leaders if they draw their last round game and he wins his. This was a very encouraging game for the US number one, particularly as Mickey Adams is notoriously hard to beat.

Tradition scoring cross table

Apologies for neglecting the Jones-Edouard match somewhat over the past couple of days. Gawain Jones pointed out to me last night the similarity between positions in the third and fourth games of the match. Game three went down to the kings, while in game four the players, having sampled each other’s rook and pawn endgame technique, decided to call it quits rather earlier and proceed to dinner. Here are two remarkably similar positions from the two games:

Gawain Jones retains his one-point lead from the initial game, with Romain still having two games left to do something about it. They play the fifth game at Olympia on Sunday, and the sixth game at the Hampstead tournament on Monday.

Photos by Ray Morris-Hill, John Saunders

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games will be 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.