Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival: winners stumble

Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival 2013

Monday 21 January - Thursday 31 January 2013

Report after rounds one and two

By John Saunders

This year’s Gibraltar Masters produced a couple of shocks in the first round as the two highest rated competitors, former Gibraltar winner Vassily Ivanchuk and world championship runner-up Gata Kamsky, were held to surprise draws by amateur players in the first round, as the participants got down to business at the Caleta Hotel.

In the second round there was a bigger shock as three times Gibraltar winner Nigel Short (above in round one) succumbed to 40-year-old Spanish IM Ismael Teran Alvarez, who is ranked only 72nd in the Masters line-up.

Five of the other top seeds, Michael Adams (England), Radoslaw Wojtaszek (Poland), Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France) and Le Quang Liem (Vietnam), are amongst the 45 players still on a 100% score.

Nigel Short holds the record for the most Gibraltar Masters titles (three) and he had only previously lost two of the 53 games he has played in his six visits to the tournament. So his defeat came as a big surprise. Nigel refused to make any excuses and admitted he couldn’t explain his poor play in this game.

Vassily Ivanchuk, 43, is through to the last eight of the World Chess Championship qualifier to be held in London in March but in round one he couldn’t make any impression on Hristos Zygouris, an untitled 38-year-old amateur player ranked 90th in Greece. Ivanchuk allowed an early exchange of queens but found he could not make progress against solid play from his opponent, agreeing a draw on move 31. Chucky may have been fractionally worse when the point was split but the Caleta Hotel bar was echoing with the opinion that a certain young man currently playing in the Netherlands would not have agreed a draw before move 231.

Similarly, 38-year-old grandmaster and former world championship runner-up Gata Kamsky from the USA was held to a draw by 23-year-old Andreas Aerni, who is not even rated within the top 100 players in Switzerland. Aerni took a different path to a draw against his distinguished opponent, mixing things up in the opening and then sacrificing a piece to force a draw by perpetual check. The American arrived at the board rather late (fortunately FIDE’s absurd ‘zero tolerance’ rule is not enforced in Gibraltar) and seemed a little out of sorts, but it took some enterprising play by the Swiss player to achieve the draw.

There were a few other surprise results in round one further down the field, with Swedish grandmaster Pia Cramling losing to Portuguese player Paulo Pinho, and grandmasters Zhao Xue of China and Sebastien Maze of France conceding draws to Johannes Kvisla of Norway and David Jameson of Wales respectively. Apart from the five games mentioned, the leading players took a heavy toll of the amateur competitors.

Vietnamese grandmaster Le Quang Liem caused a sensation a few years ago when he won the prestigious Moscow Aeroflot tournament and Moscow Open in the same year. The following game from round two showcases his remarkable talent.

Nigel Short tests my chess

Nigel Short came into the press room the other day and we happened to be chatting about teaching chess, and endgames in particular. Nigel’s recommendation was to give pupils interesting positions to solve. As an example he gave me the position below and challenged me to solve it. Suddenly I realised I had become, albeit temporarily, Nigel’s pupil. Here’s the position...

With something of a glint in his eye, Nigel got up to leave the room, saying “I shall be back in five minutes” – with the clear implication that I should have an answer ready for him when he got back. The realisation that a super-GM is putting your chess to the test is a little unnerving. I did my best to avoid the various pitfalls, prepared what I thought was the answer and awaited the teacher’s return. Sure enough, he was back in a few minutes and, with a quizzical expression on his face, wordlessly enquired after the solution. I gave what I thought was the answer. Nigel was visibly delighted – I had, of course, fallen into onto one of the traps in the position. He gave a one-move refutation of my plan, and then went off, and I again inferred that he expected an answer on our next meeting. At the beginning of the second round, whilst taking photos, I bumped into Nigel in the playing hall. Again, the wordless question – had I figured it out? This time my illustrious teacher was satisfied with the answer I gave. Phew...
Now it’s the reader’s turn. White to play – what should happen? I’ll publish the answer in the next report.

Between a rock and a snowy place

One of the joys of coming to Gibraltar is to escape the arctic winter being experienced further north in Europe and elsewhere in the world. I’ve had fun taunting my UK Facebook friends with pictures of people eating outside, beautiful sunrises and the like. But the downside of the severe weather in Europe was that it cost us some competitors because of the flight cancellations in the UK and France. One of casualties was French grandmaster Marie Sebag who had been hoping to play here for the first time but was unable to travel from France.

Another top woman player who we feared might not be able to come was reigning European Women’s Champion Valentina Gunina (above), who had just had an operation to extract her wisdom teeth and was told she shouldn’t travel. But Valentina was determined to come and both her chess and her health are doing fine here. She’s on 2/2 and is going to have her stitches removed tomorrow.

Round three of the Masters took place at the Caleta Hotel at 3.00pm on Thursday afternoon. Here are the results of the third round, and here the top standings:

• Full standings of 150 players are here

Video report of round two (over one hour). There are hours and hours of video here.

Links Official tournament site All games in zipped PGN The most important games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

Copyright Saunders/ChessBase