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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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Lawrence and Jan talk about the joys of living in Hamburg.
Lawrence says that Wesley So is playing the best chess in the world at the moment. The guys say that they don’t know who is working with him but he himself works very hard on his game. A viewer says that he lives like a monk.
Jan and Lawrence dispute whether the one playing the best chess at the moment is also the strongest player in the world. This is the difference between form and aptitude.
Jan says he would back Carlsen against So in a match at the moment and the two cannot agree on their terms of reference.
The kibitzers weigh in:
- form is who is most physically fit
- best chess means winning all the time or drawing or not losing at all
- form means that you’ve been overperforming
- simply, if magnus, caruana and so play today in a round robin, who wins? That should be the definition.
- stop Lawrence OMG, please stop
- I agree that So is showing the best form. In regards to magnus vs so you have to include matchup of style
- form is temporary, class is permanent
- Wesley has the best results over the last 6 months, but I agree with Jan that Magnus’ play is actually of higher quality
- Where is Aristotle when you need him?
- Peter would solve this discussion very quickly
- Wesley is only 3.9 points away from Capuana
Harikrishna’s resourcefulness, Adhiban’s breakout performance, So’s streak without a loss are all discussed. The guys call up the Gibraltar games of Cauruana and Peter Svidler on the screen to talk about. The news comes in that Ivanchuk has lost on time at Gibraltar. Really, this chess in real time is most entertaining!
Later Jan shows a copy of Vassily’s scoresheet supplied by Ben Finegold, and it is missing move 24, so that contributed to his not making the time control at move 40.
________
Aronian won the game of the day against Richard Rapport. Adhiban-Nepo was a theoretical debate. Nepo made a piece sacrifice out of the gate but at the end it was a draw. Eljanov-Wei Yi was a confusing draw. So won a nice game against Wojtaszek and cemented his lead in the tournament. A flawless game by Wesley So. The last game to finish is Karjakin-Andreikin and a win for the former.
The games:
Tata Steel Masters 2017
Round 10, Jan. 25, 2017
Harikrishna, Pentala – Carlsen, Magnus
C48 Four Knights, Spanish variation
Jan says that looking back on this round, Magnus won’t be happy drawing against Adhiban; he was never really better after the first few moves of the opening. Anish Giri had a winning position against Harikrishna but the latter, with his customary resourcefulness, was able to draw. Rapport-Van Wely ended in a draw. Andreikin-So also ended in a draw from a well-known line. Karjakin got himself in trouble very early against Wei Yi and lost.
The guys seem to be interested in chess today and don’t talk much about TV shows and popular culture.
The one tournament that Jan does play each year is the Thai Open. He does a six-hour flight to Dubai, rests a few hours and then does another six hours to Bangkok.
This year at the 17th Bangkok Chess Club Open, former champions including GMs Nigel Short, Paco Vallejo, Jan Gustafsson and Wang Hao will face a strong challenge from a contingent of hungry young grandmasters, barely in their twenties: Ma Gun, Falko Bindrich, Karen H. Grigoryan, Niclas Huschenbeth, S. Dhopade Swapnil and Wan Yunguo are all grandmasters born in the 1990s, while GM Diptayan Ghosh of India (ELO 2570) is still a teenager.
It takes place at the Regent Cha-am Beach Resort, near the picturesque seaside town of Hua-hin, Thailand. The tournament runs over nine days, from 8–16 April 2017.
Jan would really like to go to a chess tournament in Japan if he could.
As you see, at this point of the day and at this point of the tournament, there is not much of importance to discuss.
A fun game to watch. Jeffrey is still under 2700 but maybe by the end of the year…
.
Round 11, Jan. 27, 2017
Xiong, Jeffery – Smirin, Ilia
E60 King’s Indian
Throughout the broadcasts, it seems that both Jan and Lawrence have been holding something back. Jan worked with Magnus on preparations for the WCC Match but he cannot say anything about it.
Lawrence was Fabiano’s manager but he hasn’t been talking of his status until now. Lawrence says that he and Fabiano have parted ways but are still on very good terms with each other. Lawrence believes that a player needs a manager for scheduling, organization, checking his emails and negotiating good conditions; someone to help take care of business.
It is not everyone who can afford a team of helpers, even if you are in the top ten. Carlsen, Levon, Vishy, Topalov and Fabi are on the list of those who can.
Tukmakov is now working with Wesley So as his coach for seven months now. He has been able to do without until now because of his unbelievable focus. Tukmakov formerly coached Anish Giri.
The big jump by Wesley in the past year was in his rate of conversion of good positions – that is 100%, almost Karpovian, whereas Anish hasn’t learned that skill yet.
Coaches are not as good athletes as their player but they can identify weaknesses and help then with that. That is what is funny with Nakamura and Kris Littlejohn, who is quite weak compared with Hikaru. Chris is mainly there to work on the openings using the computer.
Kris performs some of his work weeks or even months before a tournament, as soon as he knows which players are entered. He starts gathering information from the databases about the moves those players like to use.
Once he knows which players Hikaru will be going up against and finds out the "colors" (who will play white and who will play black in each game), he analyzes the openings commonly used by Hikaru's opponents. Then he tries to find a "novelty" — a responsive move that has never been played before. He uses branching to predict all the possible moves that a given opponent could play, and which moves that player would be comfortable with, given his historical games. Branching each move, he eventually comes up with a report in the format of game notation, but with all the branching possibilities included.
The only place where you get a salary if you are over 2600 is in Iceland.
As a pure player you could get 30,000 euros a year. The average income in Germany is 3300 euros a month.
_______
Lawrence talks about a movie with Larry David called Whatever Works (1996). He plays a chess coach called Boris Yellnikoff. In the scene I saw on YouTube, he has a confrontation with a mother on whose son he dumped the pieces from a chessboard to shake him out of his torpor!
Watching the Eljanov-Carlsen game, Lawrence says that every time he predicts a Carlsen loss, he wins. Jan says it is like the movie The Cooler (2003). Wikipedia says that in old-school gambling parlance, a casino "cooler" is an unlucky individual, usually a casino employee, whose mere presence at the gambling tables usually results in a streak of bad luck for the other players.
Lawrence could be a reverse cooler for Magnus or anyone else. He asks if he could charge for the service and Jan says he learned from The Joker in the second Batman movie, that if you are good at something, you should charge for it.
Talking of superstition, Aronian has a deal with van Wely, that when they meet, Loek gives him 5 or 10 euros, for nothing. Loek thinks he is helping a friend with that superstition but Jan suspects that Levon is just hustling him.
Jan says that movies he has seen and didn’t like were Rogue 1 and Zoolander 2 but he did like Hell or High Water (2016) which follows two brothers who carry out a series of bank robberies to save their family ranch
Eric Hansen is losing to Sopiko. On the chess chat we get these comments:
- Today she will need all her losing skills to turn this game into a loss. She will manage!
- Chessbrah Hansen can withstand a lot, except perhaps beautiful women
______
The game of the day is Eljanov-Carlsen where Magnus fought back to win.
Tomorrow is the last round and Carlsen is playing Karjakin.
The games:
Tata Steel Masters 2017
Round 12, Jan. 28, 2017
Eljanov, Pavel – Carlsen, Magnus
A90 Dutch Defence
Sopiko had the better of the game but left herself dangerously short of time (less than 2 minutes) for the last eight moves.
Jeffrey Xiong now stands 4th in the U.S., behind Caruana, So and Nakamura. Aryan is touted to become No. 2 in Norway. Here he essays a weaker variant of the Petrov and …
(chess.com) - That loss permitted both Gawain Jones (vs Vladimir Dobrov) and Markus Ragger (vs Jorden van Foreest) to leapfrog Xiong into shared first place heading into the final round. Tomorrow all three of those players and Ilia Smirin (also in third with Xiong) still have a shot at victory and a spot in the masters tournament next year.
Round 12, January 28, 2017
Jones, Gawain – Dobrov, Vladimir
B22 Sicilian, Alapin
There are many important games in this the last round.
Magnus sacrifices a piece with 9. Nxg5, which leads to a good position but after this the computer evaluation goes up and down. At the first time control, Jan says that any of the three results are still possible in this game.
In the meantime Nepomniachtchi has lost against So and so Wesley has won the tournament.
Two other games have results, with Van Wely and Adhiban.
Tata Steel Masters 2017
Round 13, Jan. 29, 2017
Nepomniachtchi, Ian – So, Wesley
A45 Trompovsky Attack
The guys say that Adhiban has had a great tournament. Someone in the chat room says Adhiban jumps 44 places adding 28.5 points and ends up at 2682.
Wei Yi also had a good tournament.
In the distance there is the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Jan says that at home he has a Roomba robotic vacuum. He programs it to do the floors from 12:00 until 12:30 every day and it does a good job. He would like to have a cooking robot. Lawrence says that there is one called Robot Chef. The machine consists of two remarkably dexterous robotic arms installed atop a cooking area, complete with hotplates, a sink and an oven. The firm hopes to bring a consumer version to market by 2017 that will feature several additions, including a library of thousands of recipes, a dishwasher and a refrigerator. This means you not only won’t have to cook or prep for yourself if you can’t be bothered, but you don’t even need to wash up afterward. It will set you back close to $15,000 (£10,000), but hopefully the price will go down over time as with any new technology.
Carlsen-Karjakin is a draw.
Round 13, Jan. 29, 2017
Carlsen, Magnus – Karjakin, Sergey
C53 Giuoco Piano
Wesley So beat Ian Nepomniachtchi in the final round of the 2017 Tata Steel Masters to win the tournament by a full point ahead of reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen. An extraordinary finale saw first wins for Dmitry Andreikin and Loek van Wely as the chasing pack crumbled, with defeats for Levon Aronian and Wei Yi, while Magnus Carlsen squandered a chance to beat Sergey Karjakin. Gawain Jones survived by the skin of teeth against Lu Shanglei to win the Challengers and qualify for the 2018 Masters.
Wesley beat five of the bottom six players to score +5, finish a full point ahead of Carlsen (+3) and remain the only unbeaten player:
His unbeaten record of course stretches further, to a remarkable 56 classical games over more than six months:
Bilbao Masters (Round 5 onwards): 6 games, +1
Sinquefield Cup: 9 games, +2
Olympiad: 10 games, +7
Isle of Man Open: 9 games, +4
London Chess Classic: 9 games, +3
Tata Steel Masters: 13 games, +5
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