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White to play for the initiative (23rd move)

Ivanchuk-Kramnik 2009 ,Tal Memorial Round 9

The 2009 Tal memorial just finished, with Kramnik taking first place. Congratulations to Vlad for a victory in a super strong tournament ! His style was energetic throughout the whole tournament.

1-Kramnik 6/9
2&3 Ivanchuk,Carlsen 5.5/9
4&5 Anand,Aronian 5/9

Anand was in contention for first place but lost his last game to Aronian pretty badly.

It looks like Ivanchuk had a very strong attack against Kramnik in the 9th round, but he missed the critical continuation somewhere between move 21 and 25.
Concrete analysis and full game on the following 2 links:

http://www.thechessmind.net/storage/chess-posts/talmemorial2009_rd9.htm
http://www.chessbase.com/news/2009/talmem/games/round09.htm


Post tournament, there is a lot of chatter about Carlsen being unofficially the best rated player in the world ( less than a point ahead of Topalov!). This is following lots of hype about Kasparov training Carlsen to become the next world champ.


My simple and subjective view on the top chess players currently is as follows:

1.Anand and 2.Kramnik are the two strongest players as of November 2009. I believe that if they were to play another match, Kramnik would try to play more dynamically, which is he what he did in his next tournaments. I noticed that Anand had not won a tournament since he is world champ, but played well enough to finish 2nd ( or here 4th). These two players are stronger than the field at this juncture.

Next come 3.Topalov,4.Carlsen and 5.Aronian. These 3 are achieving impressive results with regularity at the very top, but wouldn't at this stage challenge succesfully Anand or Kramnik in a match.
What about the 2010 Topalov-Anand match ? I believe Anand would be clear favorite if the location would be in a neutral country. Having it in Sofia,Bulgaria is definitely increasing Topalov's chances, as Anand may feel psychologically presssured to play in Topalov's home country with obvious and numerous benefits.

After these 5 players, there is another layer of still super strong grandmasters. The main difference would be their consistency (or lackthereof) or experience at the very top.
This would include Ivanchuk,Morozevich,Gashimov,Vachier-Lagrave and Nakamura among many others. Ivanchuk for instance may very well win the Tal Memorial or Wijk aan Zee, as he is a truly brilliant player. He may just not sustain this level throughout the year.
These players are sometimes less well-known, which is why tournaments like London 2009 are exciting as new players are given a chance to compete against the best.
Nakamura will compete in London 2009, and Vachier-Lagrave won Biel 2009 ahead of Morozevich and others.

Black to play and win !

Black to play and win the game !


Hint: Black is GM Chuchelov, and he combined threats to the exposed White king.

Two tactical positions (Rating level ~ 2000)

1- Black to play and win

2- White to play and win !

Tactics,Tactics, chess middle game is 99% tactics ...

Tactical conclusion: PART II

White to play and win (Follow-up from previous post)
The previous post name Tactical Conclusion got commentators posting very interesting lines. Everyone agreed to play the introductory good moves as follow

1 Qg8+ Kh6 2 Qh8+ Kg5 which brings the diagram above

Can you work out all variations on move 3 ?

tactical conclusion

Can you win the following position with White ?

You can try against your computer ( Fritz, Rybka ) or try to visualize the winning line and post it in the comments section.

The most difficult is to win a won game !

Game of the day (Nunn-Georghiu 1983)

Classic Attacking game against Sicilian Defense


You can control the display by clicking squares on the board:
Click on B2 to stop Autoplay. Click again to activate.
Click E2 for slower Autoplay
Click E1 to play 1 move at a time. Click D1 for takeback
Click A1 for start of the game, H1 for end

Finally click Esc for help or Square G8

Copyright/Credits for applet: Paolo Casaschi, pgn4web (see http://code.google.com/p/pgn4web/)

How to attack against the Sicilian Defense : follow the GMs !

White to play and win in the three positions below.

All positions come from the sicilian opening with Black ( specifically Sicilian Kan/Taimanov), and White is playing the attack quite well ( strong GM each time !)


1-Spassky-Capelan



2-Nunn-Gheorgiu



3-Anand-Polgar

Note:
The reader interested in the solutions can replay the entire games (and additional thematic sicilian games, featuring wins from the black side too) through this link:

http://theory.top10chess.com/template.html

This link is using a new reader developed by Paolo Casachi (Pgn4Web).