I don’t know, do you? Send your suggestions to #dohachess2016.

In the meantime, I’ll go with this.

By the way, if you really want a laugh, then run “непомнящий” through Google Translate. One can’t make such things up.

Sometimes fake news are easy to spot, aren’t they? Of course he drew the last game also, which makes it nine in a row 🙂

Playing like Giri has many advantages:

• you never have a bad day
• you never have a bad tournament
• as long as you are seated in the lower half you will gain rating
• it’s easier to find moves that don’t spoil the position, than finding an advantage in positions where it doesn’t exist

While 21…Rb8 looked like the losing blunder during the game, it was actually not that easy. Deeper analysis shows that there may not have been any satisfactory alternative left in the position. It also shows what chess has come down to at the highest level: If the engine tells you to sac a queen, you simply do it and win a brilliancy.

It wasn’t easy to equalize this extremely unbalanced position, but Anish managed to do it. Six in a row!

Five in a row!

Sometimes it just looks a bit too easy.

It’s tough to come up with an explanation for Smirnov, but I guess he had his reasons. Throwing away your white and trying to stay in the match with the Hedgehog is an ambitious concept after all. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.

Smirnov seems to believe that he has better chances in the tie-break. Otherwise going for this line wouldn’t make any sense.

Whenever I follow Peter Svidler’s coverage on chess24, I have to watch the same amount of Sarah Silverman in order to restore the balance. That’s not the subject of this column though. This is about his style as a player. Svidler has a rather high percentage of short draws, but he isn’t the typical Drawmeister who goes for repetitions all the time either. Instead his approach lies somewhere inbetween freerolling his opponents and just being a friendly collegue, who offers to chop the pot. His preferred method seems to be playing lines that may look ambitious to amateurs and sponsors, but where “everything comes off” in the end. Sometimes it doesn’t work as intended, but that doesn’t stop players from calling it a day 😉