Monthly Archives: Oct 2014

Baku GP 2014 – Round 2

By Alex Colovic  on Oct 03,2014
Tournaments - No Comments
Today life got in the way and I couldn’t follow the games live. In fact, all day I was running errands while thinking whether Caruana will lose another Najdorf to Gelfand!

Caruana had 4 losses in a row with white in the Najdorf in 2013 (5, if you also count the Tal Memorial blitz): he lost to Topalov, Dominguez, Gelfand and Nakamura (and Karjakin in the blitz). This is quite extraordinary at that level. Then he got one back by beating Gelfand in Wijk this year with this astonishing opening idea:


Then he got in trouble again in a Najdorf, this time against Topalov in Stavanger this year, as a result of a failure to remember the lines (and I vividly remember Topalov’s “it’s impossible to remember” from the press conference), but he managed to draw.

So the Najdorf seemed to be a bit of a soft spot in Caruana’s white repertoire and yet he bravely went ahead and played it again against one of the world’s best connoisseurs of the opening in the whole history of the game. This time he deviated from the astonishing idea that helped him win in Wijk and went 13 Na5. Then interesting things started to happen.


An amazing fight! And the Najdorf seems to be a good weapon against Caruana!

Andreikin lost feebly against Nakamura with white in a Dutch. At least that’s the impression I got. Perhaps his way too long lay off after the Candidates was a mistake? From around move 15 onwards he was simply outplayed as Nakamura improved the position of his pieces while Andreikin stayed passive. A strange game.

Grischuk played a tame line against Karjakin’s QID and didn’t get an advantage, but he did get a complex middlegame position, quite typical of the opening. Grischuk missed the cute 32 Bf8

32 Bf8!!

and the less cute 37 Nb5 to win outright and this was enough leeway for Karjakin, the famous escape artist.

Of all the players, it should have been Dominguez who should have had 2/2. Today he tortured Tomashevsky for a very long time, and missed a few wins on the way. Black introduced a superficial novelty on move 15, the comp’s suggestion and deviating from the recent game Anand-Aronian, Bilbao.


Again it was time-trouble that prevented Dominguez to find the win on moves 74 (74 g4 or 74 h5) or 75 (75 g4). The same story as yesterday and it is usually a bad sign not to win winning positions.

Radjabov played the Berlin with black against Kasimdzhanov and the most curious moment was this one:

20 Nd8!

The game still finished in a draw though.

Svidler followed in the footsteps of the Partriarch, by adopting his initial idea (8 h3) in the line in the QGD that he invented in the match against Petrosian:

Mamedyarov didn’t react to well and eventually lost, but not before he was pretty OK. I read that Svidler wasn’t too happy with the level of his play.

So we have a lot of players with 1.5/2 and exciting times ahead. Stay tuned!

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Baku GP 2014 – Round 1

By Alex Colovic  on Oct 02,2014
Tournaments - 1 Comment
Promising start of the new Grand Prix series – even though the first game to finish was the friendly draw between Mamedyarov and Radjabov, the other games were very interesting.
The first win was achieved by Gelfand against Andreikin. It was surprising how weak Andreikin’s opening preparation was – he didn’t play anything after the Candidates, so surely he could have prepared something! But no, he went along with something he’d played before (nothing wrong with that per se) and got busted simply because the line turned out to be dubious. The real issue here is how come Andreikin didn’t figure out that himself, since other games have already shown the way. The game was short and sweet for Gelfand who demonstrated powerful play.

The second win was notched by Caruana against Karjakin, with black. Caruana played the QGD again, like against Vachier in St. Louis, when in his own words was happy with a draw. And it seems that he would have been happy with a draw here, too, but Karjakin managed to put him under some pressure, I really liked his g3, Kg2, Rh1 and h4 plan.


Caruana defended patiently and they entered wild time-trouble with a few minutes for some 10 moves and the game was decided then. Simply put, Caruana’s nerves were stronger and he withstood the pressure better, while Karjakin cracked and blundered. On a positive note for Karjakin, he was wearing a jacket without his sponsor’s logo on it. Perhaps he’s no longer trying to bring the crown back to Russia?
The other games were drawn, but Dominguez should have won against Kasimdzhanov, after being worse, but here again time-trouble played the decisive role.
At the press conference Nakamura said he was enjoying Svidler’s videos instead of preparing and came up with a tame line against the Spanish. He got nothing and was lucky not to get in real trouble.

Tomashevsky and Grischuk went for a heavy theoretical discussion in the Grunfeld, white repeating his rare move 18 g3 that he played in 2013. And then they followed a correspondence game until move 27 when the correspondence players agreed a draw, while our well-prepared protagonists had to obey the 30-move no draw rule and played on until move 32. That’s good preparation and memory!

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Baku GP Starts and My 100th Post!

By Alex Colovic  on Oct 01,2014
Tournaments - 4 Comments
The Baku GP starts tomorrow with an impressive field of players – Caruana, Grischuk, Nakamura, Karjakin, Dominguez, Mamedyarov, Gelfand, Svidler, Andreikin, Radjabov, Kasimdzhanov and Tomashevsky. For me the most intriguing thing will be to see whether Caruana’s latest super-results have come as a result of him reaching a new level (which will be very exciting if true) or they can be attributed to simply “a great period” in his career.

This is my 100th post, an important milestone and an opportunity to look back and see how things have been so far. When I started this blog, in February this year, I never set myself any goals. It was a work of love and passion for the game, writing and understanding things. In fact, it is this understanding of things that makes it very exciting for me – I want to understand what is going on in the games of the best players and then to put that into words, to explain it, first to myself and then to my readers.
Just a few days ago I finally managed to introduce a game viewer in my blog, a big improvement when it comes to game commentary. It was something I knew I had to do, but it took some time actually implementing it.
Generally I have received positive feedback blog from various sources. I really appreciate it and I thank you all. It serves as a bit of a confirmation that what I do is well-perceived and probably interesting to read.
I would like to thank all the people who helped me build this blog: Sifu, for hard work on the design and the technical part, Doctor Kiril, for the artistic photography and invaluable insight, my family for constant support and encouragement and my numerous chessplaying friends for tips and the occasional like on Facebook and retweet on Twitter.
I like to think this is just the beginning in the life of a very popular and successful blog, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the immortal words of Boris Gelfand, I only concentrate on the next game.
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Break Down Anti-Sicilians
The Najdorf Sicilian: Simplified
Lifetime Repertoires: Queen's Gambit Declined
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