ChessBase
Magazine #152 The cover of this magazine shows the world champion and the current numero uno sharing a light moment. Botvinnik would not have approved. The Patriarch did maintain "correct" relations with his rivals. But it would not have done to be too friendly with someone intent on wresting his crown.
Anand has no such hang-ups about his opponents. He would say, “We are all rivals, but don’t forget we are also colleagues.” Indeed, he has maintained a cordial relationship with Magnus Carlsen. But the easy camaraderie should not be mistaken for complacency. In recent years Magnus has given Vishy a tough time and also beaten him on occasion. Nevertheless, he has healthy respect for the knowledge and experience of the World Champion. I shall revert to this theme soon.
This issue of ChessBase Magazine deals with a number of important events like London Classic, Tashkent Grand Prix and Bucharest. It also continues Carlsen’s saga with his rivalry with experienced opponents like Anand and Kramnik who have both held the world title.
In London Chess Classic it was Kramnik who raced with Carlsen and remained unbeaten throughout. He finished second with +4, =4, –0 just behind Magnus (+5, =3,-0). Ordinarily their scores would have read: Carlsen 6.5/8 and Kramnik 6/8. But with the three-point system Carlsen made a whopping 18 points and Kramnik “only” 16 points. Anyway this DVD carries a nice post-mortem of their individual encounter which ended in a tough draw. Anand handicapped himself with a blunder against Michael Adams and a spate of draws. He showed his class in only one nice game (see the victory against Gawain Jones in this DVD). But the critical encounter was with Carlsen.
Here it’s deeply annotated by Evgeny Postny. Enjoy!
A hard fight that offers a foretaste of the bitter battle that lies ahead between the World Champion and the Challenger.
The second major tournament, Tashkent Grand Prix was won by Sergey Karjakin, Alexander Morozevich and Wang Hao with 6.5/11. In their individual encounter Karjakin shone with a beautiful combination against Morozevich, his fellow-winner.
As he himself admits in his commentary on the game in this issue, it was not smooth sailing for him. Such modesty notwithstanding it’s a fine finish.
The drawing combination shown on the candidate move 52.Ke3 is no less remarkable than the finale of the game itself. It’s a pity that the talented Sergey is not among the current contenders for the world championship.
For reasons of space I cannot do justice to other events reported in this issue like the King’s Tournament at Bucharest. Vassily Ivanchuk and Veselin Topalov vied for first place, and the Bulgarian was a bit unlucky to lose in the tie-break.
This brings me to the other sections of the Magazine. There are eleven detailed opening surveys ranging from Sicilian to Semi-Slav. Apart from these surveys, there are regular exercises in opening traps, middlegame tactics and endgame technique. Jolly stuff! I wish I had shown some here.
In all this DVD has 850 games of which 112 are annotated. A word on these annotations. Quite a few of them are in chess video format with the players sharing their impressions in post-mortem. Listening to them gives us a fair idea of what was going on during the game. Nevertheless, this kind of analysis has its limitations. After a long and hard struggle players are very tired and it is just not fair to drag them before the cameras and ask them to field questions. In any case what they say in the post-mortem would not go far enough. When they analyse the same in the quiet of their study they are able to see more and assess it better. Personally speaking, I prefer this latter method of detailed analysis, and not the clever talk of compères with players. In this respect the present DVD does not fall behind. Apart from Evgeny Postny (whose analysis we have just seen) it also has annotations by others like Mihail Marin, Lubomir Ftácnik and Michal Krasenkow.
Last but not least, this DVD comes with the latest version of ChessBase Reader and I have found its analytical abilities quite helpful.
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