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Bail out?

When Nakamura bursted into the scene he had one huge weakness and that were his openings. Over the years he made the transition and incorporated freerolls and forced draws into his repertoire. Just look up his win in the English against Karjakin and you know what I am talking about. In the following game Naka is willing to repeat an old line that dates back to the Kortchnoi-Karpov match in 1978. It looks like Karjakin smelled a rat and went for the forced draw.

Fool me twice

Pono did it again. This time he stole rating points from the Don with a line that has already been featured on this very website.

 

So weird

Every once in a while you can see what happens, when engine-kids are on their own. In such cases the game usually ends very fast and things can become rather ugly. In the featured game, Wesley was obviously caught out of preparation in a static type of position, where dynamic resources simply don’t exist. The weird thing is that he refused to castle and instead tried everything he could to open up files against his own king. I bet the most difficult task for Carlsen in this game was to hide the grin on his face.

On a sidenote I should mention that I underestimated Carlsen in my predictions. Playing something other than his match openings doesn’t hurt him that much, because there are so many quiet systems to chose from, where he can make something out of nothing.

Drawmeister of the Day

It may surprise a lot of people, but Chucky can play the Drawmeister also. Well, that’s part of being completely unpredictable. There is actually a pretty decent chance that he even surprised himself.

 

Robin vs. Batman

The tournament in Bilbao has about the worst lineup that one could ever imagine. Carlsen and Karjakin can’t play their main openings, Giri and Wei Yi are both Drawmeisters, So is a classical Bumhunter, but there are no bums in the field, which basically leaves it to Nakamura to grab the money.

Drawmeister of the Day

Vacation is over and the Drawmeisters are back at work shuffling pieces around for no purpose other than stealing rating points. This time Pono shows us a simple way to tame Kramnik’s already rather tame Semi-Trash Variation: Push a4-a5 and liquidate the queenside!

Back on track

After the unfortunate experience in the Najdorf, our hero chose the much safer 1.d4 and managed to kill the position in his usual style.

Taking a look at the position after gxf3 as a winning attempt was inspired by the following classic and one of my favorite games. Since Leko never had the chance to seize the c-file like Botvinnik, his decision cannot be blamed though. After all we want to be fair, don’t we?

Not in shape (yet)!

Things don’t look to good for our hero so far. He drew in the first round as expected, equalized with black in the second round and as a true gentleman he refused to beat a woman in the third round. In the fourth round he had to face the guy with the name that nobody can pronounce (Ne-pom-ni-she). I don’t know what went wrong with the preparation for this game, because Leko plays a novelity on move 15 and loses track immediately after a rather obvious reply that is among the top choices for every engine, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Basically it was a rare loss straight from the opening.

 

On a sidenote: Hou Yifan found a nice drawing mechanism against Chucky. It is neither forced up to that point nor are there any predecessors, so I assume that it was just an over the board creation.

Christmas in July

I don’t know about you, but whenever Peter Leko plays a game, it feels like a major holiday to me. Ok, he played all the top computer moves and ended up a pawn down, so it wasn’t the typical draw that the fans would have expected. Still it all ended in a repetiton and who wants to argue with the master? We’re not worthy!

Sometimes it’s not that easy

If you are searching for draws in the Qc2-Nimzo, you will find this model game by Khalifman, who was an absolutely brilliant player once, but became a Drawmeister at the later stage of his career.

If you check this game with engines, you will notice that 10… f6 is their top choice, so if you want to go for this line, you have to come up with an answer. Khodashenas came up with such an answer, but he was still in for a rough ride, because 19…Nf6 keeps it alive.