CBM #153 – for professionals and connoisseurs

ChessBase Magazine #153

Review by Prof. Nagesh Havanur

15th January, 2013. The fourth round in the Wijk aan Zee tournament is in progress. I had strolled rather late into the tournament hall and gave only a fleeting look to the Aronian-Anand game and moved on to see other boards. Moments later I am back and Aronian still has not moved. Then with characteristic nonchalance he stops the clocks and congratulates his opponent. The hall breaks into stormy applause.

“One for the ages,” said Carlsen who subsequently won the tournament with a phenomenal score of 10/13.

The game Aronian,L - Anand,V 0-1 from the fourth round was one of the real highlights of the tournament. Not just because it involved, in only 23 moves, an unusually short victory for Black in top-level chess. Anand referred to the game in the subsequent interview as one of the best games of his entire career. "To win a game like that against my dreaded opponent Levon is just great."

In this issue of ChessBase Magazine the World Champion himself annotates the game.

A game worthy of its predecessor Rotlewi-Rubinstein, Lodz 1907. The great Polish master would have been delighted.

The Zürich Challenge was a four-player round robin tournament, and the Italian talent Caruana won ahead of Anand, Kramnik and Gelfand. Caruana remained unbeaten throughout and his rivals lost one game each. In this DVD Caruana himself annotates his encounter with Kramnik. A fascinating draw with some incredible variations.

Readers might find the course of Gibralter Masters even more interesting. This was a massive event (ten rounds with 247 players!) with a number of leading GMs like Ivanchuk, Shirov and Kamsky biting the dust. In the end it was Nikita Vitiugov who took the first prize on tie-break ahead of Vachier Lagrave, Sandipan Chanda and Nigel Short all on 8/10 points.

This brings me to the other sections of the Magazine. There are twelve detailed opening surveys ranging from the Sicilian to Slav. One valuable survey is Alexey Kuzmin’s analysis of Slav Exchange, an excellent antidote to aggressive play by Black. 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.cxd5 cxd5 5.Bf4 Nc6 5.e3

Alexey Kuzmin shows that on 6...Bf5 7.Qb3 may follow. Today 6...a6 is preferred after which the author analyses two variations: 7.Bd3 and the more subtle 7.Rc1.

Apart from these surveys, there are regular exercises in opening traps, middlegame tactics and endgame technique. The section on tactics is a mixed bag and the more experienced solver might find some of the examples too easy. But even he would find the following position tough. Black missed his way in complications and lost. Can you do better?

A missed opportunity

In all this DVD has 1,857 OTB games of which 82 are annotated. Apart from Anand (whose analysis we have just seen) this DVD also has annotations by veterans like Mihail Marin and Michal Krasenkow. The Tele-Chess section has 8000+ games of which 43 are annotated by CC GMs Juan Morgado and Roberto Alvarez. Correspondence Chess is often viewed as a poor cousin of OTB chess. Hopefully, the efforts of Morgado and Alvarez would help dispel that wrong impression.

Last but not least, this DVD is an excellent curtain-raiser for the Candidates’ Tournament that followed. We shall see that in the next DVD.

Recommended for both the professional and the connoisseur.

• Full Description of the contents of CBM 153
• Just Out: ChessBase Magazine 154 (to be reviewed soon)