Kavalek in Huffington: Chess Winners Win Slowly

Chess Winners Win Slowly

By GM Lubomir Kavalek

"I am playing all-out to win, because I like to win tournaments," are the words we could expect from the world's top-rated player Magnus Carlsen. But these words were uttered 40 years ago by Bobby Fischer before he won the world championship match against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Fischer played in eight U.S. championships and won them all. In 1963 he won all games. He won 20 consecutive games on his way to the world title during the 1970 Interzonal and the 1971 Candidates matches. At the 1962 Interzonal in Stockholm he outraced the competition by 2.5 points, in Buenos Aires in 1970 by 3.5 points. His FIDE rating skyrocketed to 2785 points in 1972, leaving the next player, Boris Spassky, a whopping 125 points behind. Such dominance will never be repeated.

But Carlsen seems to be running in Fischer's footsteps. The Norwegian grandmaster dominates the live rating list with 2843 and is closing in on Garry Kasparov's all-time highest rating record of 2851. Carlsen, 21, leads a pack of hungry young grandmasters who are willing to fight as they showed this summer. Among them is the U.S. champion Hikaru Nakamura, 24, the Italian Fabiano Caruana, 20, and Russia's Sergey Karjakin, 22.

The traditional tournament in the Swiss city of Biel used a soccer system to count the results: 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw. It should promote fighting spirit and Carlsen took advantage of it in the past. But this time he was out-kicked by a young Chinese player Wang Hao, 23, who won the first prize.

However, the organizers will have to send the traditional way of scoring to FIDE for rating, to be aligned with other tournaments. And the score is different.

It seems we have not one, but two winners in Biel, but we will let the historians sort it out.

A mad pawn rush

Another hot event this summer was the tournament in Dortmund, Germany, where the ten-time winner Vladimir Kramnik, 37, was again the favorite. But the former world champion missed a few chances to win games and the victory went to Caruana who shared first place with Karjakin, but had a better tiebreak.

But Kramnik created an astonishing game, playing a defense he tried to demolish in the past: the King's Indian. "I dropped the King's Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik," admits Kasparov in his new column "Garry's Choice" in the Chess Informant 114. Against the German grandmaster Jan Gustafsson, Kramnik was on the other side of the board. In the era of computers, Kramnik was able to play an opening he almost never used. The game is a remarkable symbiosis of man and machine.

In the position where heavy hitting is expected, Kramnik quietly moves his rook pawn. But behind that inconspicuous turn is hidden rage. The pawn begins a mad dash, sacrifices flare and when Gustafsson makes two rook missteps, the game is over.

Original column here – Copyright Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is an American news website and aggregated blog founded by Arianna Huffington and others, featuring various news sources and columnists. The site was launched on May 9, 2005, as a commentary outlet and liberal/progressive alternative to conservative news websites. It offers coverage of politics, media, business, entertainment, living, style, the green movement, world news, and comedy. It is a top destination for news, blogs, and original content. The Huffington Post has an active community, with over one million comments made on the site each month. According to Nielsen NetRatings, the site has around 13 million unique visitors per month (number for March 2010); according to Google Analytics the number is 22 million uniques per month.