Petrosian Memorial 2014 Starts

When it rains, it pours. Almost every day we have elite chess! Sometimes it’s too much to cover and follow, especially when life gets in the way. Therefore I’ve decided to concentrate on the World Championship match, so my comments on the Petrosian Memorial will be short.

The first round saw one win. In a rather straight-forward effort, Grischuk beat Inarkiev when the latter didn’t seem to know what to do in the Reti very early on. I know Inarkiev, he’s played for my Macedonian team a long time ago and he’s a very friendly person. I read with interest that he has now assembled a team that should help him realise his ambitions. That sounds promising indeed. Obviously he didn’t start well here (nerves, perhaps? It’s his first tournament at this level) and in this company everybody will try to beat him, but I hope he manages to get a grip of himself.

I was curious to see how Kramnik will do after his recent disasters that resulted in his falling out of the Top 10. I also read his interview on chess-news.ru (in Russian) with great interest – Kramnik’s interviews are always among the best! He talks about his recent form, his style, Petrosian and moving to Geneve. So he started today with a solid draw against Ding Liren, using a line in the QGD Exchange that has frequently been used by Short. Good preparation led to an easy draw, even though the game lasted for 41 moves.

I only briefly looked at Leko-Morozevich while in Aronian-Gelfand black had an interesting possibility to sacrifice a bishop on h2 and enter wild complications, but in true Petrosian fashion he decided not to. Perhaps it was better not to change the name of the tournament? After all, it used to be called Tal Memorial…

Alex Colovic
A professional player, coach and blogger. Grandmaster since 2013.
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2 Comments
  • Nov 5,2014 at 9:21 pm

    Leko doesn't need sacrifices to bring the game to a dead draw – he does it in a boring way, that's why we love him! 🙂

  • Nov 5,2014 at 1:31 am

    If tournament has the old name Gelfand would sacrifice for sure,but you missed spectacular sacrifice from Leko that gave him chance to bring game to death draw 🙂

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