World Cup 6.3: MVL, Tomashevsky collapse

The FIDE World Cup is a knockout, starting with 128 players, with two games (90 min for 40 moves + 30 min for the rest, with 30 seconds increment) between pairs of players. The tiebreaks consist of two rapid games (25 min + 10 sec), then two accelerated games (10 min + 10 sec), then two blitz games (5min + 3sec) and finally an Armageddon. The winner and the runner-up of the World Cup 2013 will qualify for the Candidates Tournament of the next World Championship cycle. The venue is the city of Tromsø, which lies in the northern-most region of Norway, almost 400 km inside the Arctic Circle. You can find all details and links to many ChessBase articles on Tromsø here. The World Cup starts on Sunday, August 11th and lasts until September 3rd (tiebreaks, closing ceremony). Each round lasts three days, while the final will consist of four classical games. Thursday August 29 is a free day. A detailed schedule can be found here.

Round six tiebreaks

MVL fears things to come...

In the first game Maxime Vachier-Lagrave was annihilated by Vladimir Kramnik. Despite playing Black, Kramnik played confidently, quickly and aggressively and immediately took advantage of White's awkward placement of his pieces. In only twenty moves White's position had collapsed.

In the first game Evgeny Tomashevsky obtained a superior pawn structure but Black's activity was considerable. Move by move it became clear that it was impossible for White to make any progress, while Black's position became more and more comfortable while his pawns could simply not be attacked. However Black's attack also came to an end as White's position was solidly held to gether by his knights on e2 and g3.

The second game saw Tomashevsky interestingly employ a variation which had been used against him earlier in the tournament. The exact position from Tomashevsky-Ramirez was reached, a game in which Black comfortably held a draw. Black also obtained a fabulous position in this case and seemed that he would at least hold a comfortable draw. However Black made a considerable mistake by consistently delaying the trade of queens, something which he should have done from the very beginning, and eventually his exposed king position and especially the weakness on f7 proved to be fatal and Andreikin wins another tiebreak to move on and play Kramnik in the finals.

In the most sacred of traditions, the players choose the colors in the old fashioned way

When all is said and done...

...the ex-World Champion begins the four-game match with the white pieces

All photos by Paul Trong

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