Anish Giri entertains

by Macauley Peterson
5/11/2019 – Anish Giri is one of the more extroverted Grandmasters on the professional circuit. He can be quite witty, and always has something interesting to say. He's also one of the more proactive social media presences on "chess Twitter" where he can be biting at times. He's been making the interview rounds following his win in the Shenzhen Masters in China last month. A few months ago he gave an entertaining blindfold simultaneous at his sponsor's office, Optiver in Amsterdam, which has recently published video of the event.
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Shenzhen post-mortem

Earlier this week, Anish Giri gave a long interview / masterclass with IM Sagar Shah of ChessBase India, discussing his recent victory in the Shenzhen Masters in China.

He starts off with some blindfold exercises, the first of which Giri surprisingly had already seen via his Twitter feed. The second problem, however, was new to him:

 

The problem took Giri a few minutes to work through. You'll find the solution in the video below.

The pair then had a look at Giri's three wins in Shenzhen against Harikrishna, Yu and Jakovenko.

Full interview

You can watch the full interview below and replay the games beneath the video player.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

 

Optiver blindfold simul

Since 2016, Optiver, a leading trading firm with over one thousand employees globally and offices in Amsterdam, Chicago, Sydney and Shanghai, has been sponsoring Anish Giri as he endeavours to qualify for the World Championship Candidates tournament.

Giri periodically participates in special events at Optiver's offices in Amsterdam and Chicago. The firm also partners with the Chess societies at Universities, and hosted blitz simultaneous games for the students. Company staff visit the Tata Steel Chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee each year to watch Anish play.

The latest event at Optiver saw Giri taking on three employees of the firm at their Amsterdam office on February 28th. The video was published on May 1st and the company was kind enough to send us a PGN of the games for posterity.

Full simultaneous exhibition

Replay the games below. 

Running time: 23 minutes

 

Links

Macauley served as the Editor in Chief of ChessBase News from July 2017 to March 2020. He is the producer of The Full English Breakfast chess podcast, and was an Associate Producer of the 2016 feature documentary, Magnus.

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