The Sicilian and Spanish Dragons
By GM Lubomir Kavalek
Magnus Carlsen, the world's top-rated chess player, is expected to win
every tournament he enters. The Norway Chess 2013 Super Tournament was tailored
for him as a tribute to his previous successes. For the first time, he would
compete in his homeland against some of the finest chess players in the
world, including the world champion Vishy Anand. But after Sergey Karjakin
of Russia won the first four games, the first place seemed slipping out
of Carlsen's reach.
Carlsen beat Karjakin in the fifth round in a see-saw battle (commented
below), but in the end lost the war. Karjakin scored his best tournament
victory. Carlsen shared second place with the American Hikaru Nakamura.
The spoiler of the tournament was the Chinese grandmaster Wang Hao. He
beat Carlsen in the penultimate round and Anand in the last round, forcing
the Indian grandmaster to share fourth place with Levon Aronian of Armenia
and Peter Svidler of Russia.
Nakamura booked another solid result after finishing second in the FIDE
Grand Prix in the Swiss city of Zug in April. He chose Norway over the U.S.
championship. In his absence, Gata Kamsky won his fourth U.S. title. This
time he was forced into a playoff by the fast-improving Alejandro Ramirez.
The Spanish Dragon
Once upon a time, a chess player looked up to the sky and thought that
a certain pawn formation resembled a celestial constellation. In the notes
to his game against Abram Rabinovich from Prague 1908, the Russian master
Fyodor Duz-Khotimirsky claims that he invented the name Dragon variation
in 1901 in Kiev: the pawn configuration d6, e7, f7, g6, h7 in the Sicilian
looked to him like the Draco constellation.
We can find the Dragon formation as early as in 1880 in the game Schottlaender-Winawer,
played in Wiesbaden, Germany. Others followed. One of them was the creative
Moscow grandmaster Vladimir Simagin. He added a special dimension to the
Dragon: the exchange sacrifice. He would rather give up his rook than to
exchange his dark Dragon bishop.
In 1947, Simagin won the Moscow championship ahead of David Bronstein and
Grigory Ravinsky. During the tournament he did something extraordinary:
he flipped the Sicilian Dragon formation and moved it to the other side
of the board. Since it came from the Spanish opening, I decided to call
it the Spanish Dragon. It comes after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6
3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0-0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 d6 8.c3 0-0 9.h3 Na5 10.Bc2
and now instead of Chigorin's 10...c5, he played the modest 10...c6.
It is possible that Simagin didn't know that he mirrored the Sicilian Dragon.
In 1957, the American grandmaster William Lombardy began to play the move
10...c6 and employed it in the next four decades.
The Spanish Dragon formation was better suited for the Spanish Breyer variation
(9...Nb8), where it started to appear in 1954.
And this brings us to the fascinating Spanish duel Karjakin-Carlsen.
Draco image by Sidney Hall, 1825; Karjakin-Carlsen picture courtesy
of Norway Chess
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.
