Drawing with the Najdorf

Whenever Shirov plays against stronger opponents, he choses the Be3-Najdorf it seems. Giri, well prepared as usual, answers with a computer-line that was new to me at least.

Drawmeisters of the Day

Here are a few games that caught my interest so far:

Drawmeister vacation

I don’t know what it is, maybe because it is summertime, but there is not much going on at the moment, at least in terms of forced draws.

If you want to watch exciting chess with decisive results, then check out the matches MC vs. Grischuk and Naka vs. MVL on chess.com. Just kidding! Nobody wants to watch exciting chess with lots of decisive results of course. We all love to watch computer analysis ending in forced draws, don’t we? Well, the Olympiad is coming up, so things could become “interesting” again very soon.

Expectation

If you ever wondered what Elo-difference means in expectation, here are some key odds*:

50 points difference = 5:4 odds
100 points difference = 2:1 odds
200 points difference = 3:1 odds
300 points difference = 6:1 odds
400 points difference = 10:1 odds

When Carlsen plays Caruana, it would be like pocketpair vs. overcards in Poker. Caruana on the other hand would be a 2:1 favorite against Leko, which can be quite a burden. Maybe that is the reason why Peter doesn’t get invited to such tournaments anymore.

*These are not the exact numbers, but they are close.

Coincidence or method?

When we look back, Leko was a child prodigy, Bacrot was a child prodigy, Polgar was a child prodigy, Radjabov was a child prodigy, Ponomariov was a child prodigy, Giri was a child prodigy, So was a child prodigy and Wei Yi is actually still a child prodigy. They all have something in common and that is their high percentage of short draws without a fight. The only difference is how they do it. Some prefer repetitions while others play 15 moves of mainline theory and offer a draw. Only Giri is a bit different, because he plays long games, but the overall theme with him is zero risk tolerance too.

Maybe this whole phenomenon has something to do with how child prodigies are brought up these days. They are the sensational kids who are playing in a field of strong grandmasters where a draw is sufficient to boost their rating. Their occasional wins usually come from situations when the strong GMs are pushing too hard in order to save their face. Kasparov-Radjabov, Linares 2003, would be such an example.

Giri’s career is especially interesting, because he only has a few wins against players from the top ten in classical chess, yet some people believe that he will be a challenger for the title in the not so distant future. Same goes for the chinese youngster Wei Yi. He played about 600 games to reach 2700 while mostly beating weaker opponents also. Neither Giri nor Wei Yi have won a top major tournament and yet they are some of the strongest players of the world by “definition”. This shows that you can reach the highest level by rather consistently beating 25xx-players and drawing everyone, rated 26xx and above. It is not surprising, because the result will be a 2700+ performance.

Believe it or not, but I have the feeling that the Elo-rating is the root of all evil. Being able to win Elo-points by making a draw kills the game, because there is too much incentive for not fighting it out. Chess is essentially a drawn game, so maybe the reward for reaching this result is too high in comparison for what you get for successfully disturbing the balance.

That’s one part of it, another one is the way too high k-factor for young players. Even with the k-factor 40 being capped to Elo 2300 for players under 18, it doesn’t prevent such “overrated” youngers losing points to other youngers who are above 2400 already.

In the end there is a reason why it takes  so many young players only a couple of hundred rated games to become world class after all, and it’s certainly not that their Stockfish or Komodo, whatever, finds better lines than the engines of all the other players. There is probably a lot of stat-padding going on at the tables and behind the curtain and their overall strategy is just perfectly adjusted to the rating-system.

So successful

The kid with an engine won the Sinquefield Cup 2016!

You don’t need chess books, you don’t need a coach, in fact you don’t need anything that costs money. All you need is an engine, calculation skill, good memory and a bit of luck to get your preparation in.

So stylish

Today Wesley just shut it down, but Fabi obviously didn’t mind either. With this draw So is well on his way to tournament victory. I don’t see MLV beating his Berlin in the last round and I can’t imagine Aronjan beating Topalov neither in the Ruy Lopez nor in the Italian. Maybe Svidler will blow up against Anand, which is unlikely given their history, but even in that case Wesley is a favorite to win it all.

The surprising thing is that he actually admitted killing any play in the position in the interview. Usually listening to his interviews feels like a total waste of time to me, just like watching his games, but he was honest and one has to give him credit for it. So far Wesley has shown the modern blueprint for winning tournaments. Pleasing the spectators is not part of it and nobody can blame him.

Gimme dat Ding

Went 4/5 this time, predictions are getting sharper. Still come on, I should have been 5/5! What was Ding doing there? The whole idea with Rc8 and following it up with b4 and c5, basically spitting a pawn for nothing, was totally weird. Why not simply play c6 and treat it like a Breyer? I guess we all have a pretty good idea how Topalov must have felt about it.

Playing the percentages

You can’t go much wrong by predicting draws. That’s how games between players of similar strength usually end. At least I got three predictions right this time. Nevertheless my score could have been better since MVL came close after Topalov fell into an opening trap, but unfortunately it turned out to be too difficult to convert. To be fair, I didn’t expect such a battle between Giri and Ding and I didn’t expect Caruana to allow Svidler to set up a position with a symmetrical pawn structure either. Come on, how can you play the Lasker against a guy who is struggling that much? Actually Fabi actually got lucky that Peter spoils all his good positions too.

Round 4 predictions:
Aronjan-Caruana 1/2
Nakamura-Topalov 1-0
Ding-Anand 1/2
So-Giri 1/2
MVL-Svidler 1-0

 

P.S.: Congratulations to Stockfish for finally beating Komodo in TCEC again.

Play it safe!