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The Grenke Chess Classic is an elite tournament held yearly in the German city of Baden Baden and sponsored by Grenke Leasing. There have been three editions before:
2013 – six players. The winner was Vishy Anand ahead of Fabiano Capuana
2014 – eight players, all from Germany. Arkadij Naiditsch won ahead of David Baramidze.
2015 – eight players. Magnus Carlsen won on a five-game tiebreak with Arkadij Naiditsch. Michael Adams, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Etienne Bacrot, Vishy Anand and David Baramidze were the others.
There was no 2016 fixture.
2017 – The Classic will take place from 15-22 April in Karlsruhe/Baden Baden. The participants will be Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, MVL, Levon Aronian, Arkadij Naiditsch, Hou Yifan, Matthias Bluebaum and Georg Meier.
Last edited by Wayne Komer; Saturday, 25th February, 2017, 01:41 AM.
The Easter holidays are a festive season for German chess fans. This year is no exception, with the GRENKE Chess Classic 2017 being held from 15th to 22nd April. This grandmaster tournament is in a class of its own. World Champion Magnus Carlsen, who won the last GRENKE Chess Classic in 2015, will again be competing, ready to defend his title.
His strongest competitors are top ten players Fabiano Caruana, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Levon Aronian. Grandmaster Arkadij Naiditsch will once again be joining the race for tournament victory. Naiditsch, competing for Azerbaijan, stood up brilliantly to the World Champion two years ago. In a legendary final he fought against Carlsen in a tiebreak for the title, which the Norwegian only claimed in a final Armageddon game.
The organizers of the GRENKE Chess Classic 2017 are also pleased to announce the participation of Hou Yifan, the strongest female chess player in the world. Yifan is one of eight players in a line-up complemented by German national players Matthias Blübaum and Georg Meier. For the 19-year-old Blübaum it is his first time participating in a grandmaster tournament of this category and will be a great challenge. He qualified for this year's Chess Classic by winning the GRENKE Chess Open 2016.
The following eight grandmasters will be competing against each other in a round-robin tournament at the GRENKE Chess Classic 2017 (Elo ratings according to the list of 1st March 2017):
Magnus Carlsen, World Champion, Elo: 2838, Norway
Fabiano Caruana, Number 3 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2817, USA
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Number 5 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2803, France
Levon Aronian, Number 9 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2774, Armenia
Arkadij Naiditsch, Number 41 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2702, Azerbaijan
Hou Yifan, Number 110 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2649, China
Matthias Blübaum, Number 148 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2632, Germany
Georg Meier, Number 154 on the world ranking list, Elo: 2630, Germany
GRENKE Chess Classic 2017 Schedule:
15th to 17th April 2017: rounds 1 to 3 held at the Schwarzwaldhalle Karlsruhe (running parallel to the afternoon round of the Open)
18th April 2017: rest day and move to Baden-Baden
19th to 22nd April 2017: rounds 4 to 7 held at the Event Akademie Baden-Baden
The website will be updated continuously with the latest information.
As a special feature of the event, the first three rounds of the GRENKE Chess Classic will run parallel to the GRENKE Chess Open at the venue in Karlsruhe. After a rest day, all Chess Classic players will then move to Baden-Baden in order to complete rounds four to seven. We welcome everyone to join us and experience first hand the remaining games of the stars at the Event Akademie in Baden-Baden.
Games start at 15:00 local or 9:00 a.m. Toronto/Montreal time
Venue: Schwarzwaldhallte Karlsruhe (Round 1 to 3), Event-Akademie Baden-Baden (Round 4 to 7) Time control: 100 min/40 moves + 50 min/20 moves + 15 min/rest of the game with a 30 sec increment from move 1 Draws: No draw offers before move 40 Tiebreakers: 1. Number of wins, 2. Number of wins with Black, 3. Head-to-head score
In case of a tie for first place: 2 games with 10 min + 2 sec a move; then if needed 2 games with 5 min + 2 sec a move; finally a game with 6 min for White and 5 min for Black + 2 sec a move (in case of a draw Black wins)
__________
The Grenke Open is running concurrently. Some of the names there – Vitiugov, Matiakov, Rapport, Bacrot, Fedoseev, Moiseenko, Kamsky – 714 players!
Peter Doggers tells you all you have to know about the start of the Grenke Classic:
Both Fabiano Caruana and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave dropped below 2800 in the live ratings today. In round one of the Grenke Chess Classic Caruana lost to Hou Yifan, while Maxime Vachier-Lagrave was defeated by Arkadij Naiditsch. Sporting glasses, Magnus Carlsen spoilt a "dream position" and drew with Matthias Bleubaum.
It was a very early novelty at the start of the first round, in the Schwarzwaldhalle in Karlsruhe, Germany. Recently he shared on Facebook that he has a girlfriend, and now something else changed in Carlsen's life: he is wearing glasses.
Carlsen explained that he recently took a test, and "all sorts of things were wrong." He said that he has always been a little bit near-sighted, but was getting "some kind of headaches" recently. "I didn't really have a choice anymore."
Peter Leko and Lawrence Trent are a good pair of commentators.
The playing site is very impressive with 8 boards (4 from the Classic and 4 from the Open) on a stage with a giant screen behind and the foreground taken up with the tables of players in the Open.
Lawrence says that the Casino at Baden Baden reminds him of the chess scene from To Russia with Love, which is played on the centre stage of a Doge’s palace (?) in Venice.
Peter, of course, played Kramnik for the World Championship (2004).
A question comes in about the ways players can communicate with each other during a game, screwing in knight, for example. Lawrence said that the stare-down was unpleasant. Body language too is another way. Kasparov was very good at that, a brilliant player but one who also used psychological warfare to intimidate his opponent. Peter said that the first time he played against Kasparov, he could not sleep the night before!
Asked about inspirations for novel moves, Peter said that he would go biking at the end of a day when it was cooler and he had been analyzing all day. While riding, he did the analysis and suggested the novelty to Lev Aronian, who finally played it against Wesley So in the 3rd Sinquefield Cup (2015).
Even though he is not playing in tournaments, Peter is working very hard on chess, coming up with novelties but the odds are against him getting into the world championship cycle again.
In the game against Aronian, Carlsen plays 34.Qxe4, which the guys say is a blunder and the World Champion goes from a winning position to possibly losing.
A few minutes later, Hou Yifan wins over Georg Meier and she now has won both of her games and stands first.
Naiditsch loses to Caruana. So, two results and the other two games, Carlsen-Aronian and MVL-Bluebaum continue on.
The former has an endgame of a-pawn, knight and rook against queen.
Magnus comes in for the postmortem. He is sporting his new glasses and hasn’t had his hair cut for months. Then Levon comes on too, everyone seems happy in spite of the draw; lots of laughing.
With Magnus now wearing glasses, there are only two of six competitors without them – Naiditsch and Bluebaum.
A tweet with a photoshopped picture has appeared showing Penny and Amy from The Big Bang Theory and between the two, looking a bit like Leonard Hofstader, is Magnus Carlsen!
After two hours, MVL is starting to look uncomfortable in his against Lev Aronian. Peter says that MVL knows that if he makes one inaccuracy, Levon will achieve his plan.
Fabiano in his game against Meier spent over half an hour before pushing 20.h4. Nothing spectacular there, just putting the pressure on Georg, who is twenty minutes behind him on the clock.
Comment on the game from a chessbomb kibitzer:
We have a German playing the French opening against an Italian-American. Lots of countries represented.
The guys like Hou Yifan’s position against Magnus.
Lawrence asks Peter what his personal score is against Magnus? He says between 2006 and 2009, at the beginning of Magnus’s career, he dominated him, with a score of +3 in classical chess. Then, in the Nanjing tournament he lost a Scotch to Magnus in the first round. Magnus went on to win the tournament, became number one in the world and has maintained that position ever since.
The Second Pearl Spring tournament took place between 27th September and the 9th October 2009 in Nanjing, China. It was a six-player double round robin with the players being Magnus Carlsen, Veselin Topalov, Wang Yue, Temur Radjabov, Peter Leko and Dmitry Jakovenko. Each GM dropped one game to Magnus at least. He ended up 2.5 points ahead of the field, performing at a 3002 level.
Peter lost three games to him since and so there lifetime score in classical against each other is equal.
Lawrence thinks that Magnus has his back against the wall in his game.
Levon beats MVL in their game. Magnus and Hou Yifan draw. At the post-mortem Magnus defended his play saying that he was not worse and there were interesting possibilities. Hou Yifan took the practical decision to draw and now has played her two highest-rated opponents and is at the top of the leaderboard.
Caruana had 6 minutes to Meier’s 40 seconds at move 27 and he sacrificed his knight by taking the pawn on e6 and won the game on move 35.
The commentators today are Jan Gustafsson and Peter Leko. Jan has just come back from competing in the Bangkok Open. It was won by Nigel Short and Jan shared second through fifth places. He is replacing Lawrence Trent.
The game of the day should be Carlsen-Caruana. The last time they met was in the Baku Olympiad, a draw. Their score overall is in Magnus’s favour but Fabiano has shown that he can beat him.
Peter outtalks Jan, which is difficult. Rustam Kasimdzhanov joins them. He is Caruana’s second and an expert on openings and computers.
Rustam is an Uzbekistani grandmaster and long-time second to Vishy Anand in his World Championship Matches 2008-2012 and has also trained with Sergey Karjakin.
The guys analyze the Carlsen-Caruana game. It is a Petrov, which morphs into an Exchange French. There is a discussion of the isolated pawn from the Petrov and the NimzoIndian. Isolated pawn games have virtually disappeared. Peter says that he lost a game of Naiditsch in the Istanbul Olympiad of 2012 and he sat down and analyzed why he had lost and subsequently won a game against Sokolov at Wijk aan Zee which destroyed the variation. All this even though Sokolov had published a brilliant book on isolated pawns - Winning Chess Middlegames: An Essential Guide to Pawn Structures (2009).
Actually the conversation among the three GMs is interesting, especially about the openings because all three have been seconds to World Champions.
Rustam says he spends a lot of time analyzing but also, as a second, he has his meals with Caruana and they go on walks together. Hard core analysis is done at night.
Peter says that in his work as a second, night sessions cannot be avoided and he never went to bed before 6 a.m. You try to sleep during the game because you also want to see how your analysis works out. So, you watch a bit, eat and go to sleep.
Jan says that the best way to do it is to have your seconds in a different time zone as he was when he did some work for Magnus in his New York City match.
Before computers it was much worse. You had a similar level of responsibility and no computer. Alexey Kuzmin told Rustam that when he worked for Karpov, he spent six months looking at one opening line.
In the old days you would analyze all night without a computer and then Kasparov (say) would come in, having had a good sleep and a good breakfast and analyze against you! Torture!
They discuss the Chebanenko Slav, which is being played in Bluebaum-Aronian. Peter and Jan did some analysis together on the white side in 2009. Rustam says that Chebanenko trained the Moldovan players, Bologan especially.
Chebanenko’s approach was to build up your strength by studying the openings. The old classical way was to study the endings first, so pawn endings and then rook endings, bishop and knight and finally isolated pawn positions.
John Donaldson wrote a review of Bologan’s book on the Chebanenko Slav. The first two paragraphs:
The Chebanenko Slav According To Bologan is the rare opening book written by an active world-class player. It is entirely devoted to the position reached after 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nf3 a6.
Victor Bologan, whose book of his best games was widely praised, has another winner here. His tribute to his trainer and teacher, Vyacheslav Andreevich Chebanenko (1942-1997) is full of funny and touching anecdotes and gives a good impression of what it was like to learn and analyze with him. There are several nice photos from this time period.
They talk about Magnus’s new look. Rustam says that now he resembles not so much Jon Ludvig Hammer but Frode Urkedal, a tall blonde Norwegian player (with glasses).
Rustam is a revelation to me – a man who knows chess history, is excellent in analysis, loves pop culture and is an excellent raconteur. If you have an hour, you might look at the recording of the interaction between Jan, Rustam and Peter.
The Carlsen game is a draw, Aronian beats Bluebaum, MVL beats Hou Yifan and, after a long time, Naiditsch and Meier come in with a draw.
The games:
Round 4, Apr. 19, 2017
Naiditsch, Arkadij – Meier, Georg
D02 Queen’s Bishop game
There have been good fights in all the games. Carlsen-Caruana was analyzed at home by both sides and when Caruana equalized, a draw was the logical result. It wasn’t for lack of trying. MVL tortured Hou Yifan throughout the game and she dropped her first game. The endgame there was complicated. She plays Matthias tomorrow.
Aronian won a nice game against Bluebaum. Matthias made no obvious mistakes, Aronian just played better.
Meier was a pawn up in an endgame with a rook on either side but it was a theoretical draw.
Alas, like all good dreams it was far too short. Bob, some CTer should post this news on female chat sites but unfortunately it would need context interpretation so unlikely to happen. Why do this? might attract some interest.
Jan Gustafsson and Peter Leko are the commentators.
Caruana and MVL are two members of the 2800 club. They play a sharp variation of the Najdorf. Through the course of his career, Caruana has scored 9 out of 27 since 2013 with the Najdorf. MVL does a lot of analysis in the Najdorf too.
Jan asks Peter who are the leaders among the opening innovators today. They used to be Kasparov, Leko and Kramnik. These days Peter is following Caruana because he always plays 1.e4 and has to have a large repertoire. He also follows Anish Giri, who always has fresh ideas. He has switched to the Najdorf for the last year and it is in that period that he started drawing a lot. Kramnik and Anand are still producing good stuff. Wesley So has a very solid repertoire as white. He has recently played three innovations that Peter had analyzed and prepared for himself.
Peter says that he has no cell phone and no twitter nor facebook account. His wife does have a cell phone and she usually goes along to tournaments with him. However, it did happen that she did not accompany him once and he landed at 1:30 a.m. at Grozny airport in Russia and how does he tell his team captain, who was in Sochi, that he doesn’t know how to get through the Caucasus Mountains in the middle of the night?
Jan gives the not-to-helpful advice that, for emergencies, to get one of those one-way cheap phones that drug dealers have where you use it once and then throw it away.
The guys talk about Morozevich’s recent interview. Both found it very good. Peter wouldn’t necessarily agree with him that Ivanchuk and Nepo are more talented chess players than Carlsen.
Peter says that Levon Aronian is his bête noire. He keeps losing games to him and yet can’t get mad at him because they are good friends.
Leko confides that the book he read again and again as a boy was Petrosian’s Chess Lectures and they formed his character as a player.
Jan said he became a tactical wizard by reading The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.
A clarification on the book that Peter mentioned:
Petrosian’s Legacy (2012): Prior his untimely death in Moscow on 13 August 1984.at the age of only 55, Former World Chess Champion Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian had been going over his games and was preparing lectures and notes. He was giving lectures on TV and radio. He was planning to compile them all into a book. However, due to his premature death the book was never published. His widow Rona E. Petrosian went to work with Edward Shektman recovering tapes and transcripts of these radio and TV broadcasts. With great difficulty, they were able to recover 14 of them. They are published here. This book was originally published in Russian as Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian Chess Lectures. The publisher was Soviet Radio. Every chess enthusiast should have this important work in his chess library.
The original Russian - Shachmatnye lekcii - T.V. Petrosjan (1989)
Levon has made it look very easy winning his three games. After winning with white he gets another white. Magnus after winning with black gets another black.
Comments online
- 3 wins in a row for Levon on fire
- yep Aronian still in drivers seat. He gets at least a share of the top spot if he wins one more (or ties both)
- levon looks poised to win the tournament
- Aronian with white against Hou tomorrow have to take Levon
- I am not ready to praise aronian. If I had his health and talent, I would succeed as well.
Jan Gustafsson and Peter Leko are the commentators as usual.
Jan tries to see how much Peter knows about popular culture and says that Magnus resembles a character from X-Men: First Class called Jan the Beast. Peter says that he is not interested in superheroes and Star Trek although he does like Batman. Jan asks him what Batman and gets the answer of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Jan mentions the movie Batman vs Superman and Peter says that when the superheroes start to fight against each other, that’s it, it is not his style.
Hou Yifan makes a move in a lost position (two pawns down) so that Levon will come to the board and she can resign.
At the post-mortem Levon repeats Svidler’s dictum on winning endgames: When you are winning, (cash in your assets) make a decision, but do it quickly.
Jan: How do you know you are cashing-in?
Levon: It doesn’t matter, just as long as it is quick. (lots of laughter from the panel).
I cannot recall hearing the expression “cashing in” before so searched and found this description of an Aronian-Nakamura game at Sinquefield Cup 2016:
“Too many weak squares and pawns began to appear on Nakamura's side of the board.
Aronian cashed in and picked up his first pawn with 34.Rxb6. The second pawn fell much later with 59.Bxe4. Aronian's conversion may not have been the most efficient, but it was certainly sufficient, denying Nakamura any real counter-chances.”
Naiditsch-Carlsen has an interesting endgame, Q against two rooks and bishop, which ends in a draw. Carlsen’s hair is the most unruly I have ever seen in chess. After the post-mortem Jan asks about it. He says that he went to a spa yesterday and the water and conditioner fluffed it up. He is not trying to look like Jon Ludvig Hammer. Arkadij said that he was too intent on the game to notice Magnus’s hairstyle. For a photo, see:
The endgame Bluebaum-Caruana is going on so long that Jan asks Peter what actor’s movies you would take to a desert island. You get DVDs with all their movies and no other to distract you during your long stay on the island.
Various choices come up – Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harrison Ford, Denzel Washington… Gene Hackman is dubious according to Jan, Kevin Spacey, especially for The Usual Suspects, Brad Pitt, Orson Wells.
Peter tells a very funny story about attending a movie in Dortmund with his wife. They showed up at the cinema at 8 o’clock because, in Hungary, the movies always start at eight on the dot. They were the only ones in the theatre for a Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz film, so they bought drinks and popcorn and sat and ate for half an hour. Then people started filtering in. But Peter wanted something else to eat and so, even though the movie might start at any moment, he went out and bought drinks and popcorn and came in. The lights were out and the movie had started, and it was so dark that he couldn’t see his wife. Also, some how he was casting his shadow on the screen and people were shouting for him to sit down. He stooped down, saw his wife and went in holding the goodies. A lady had put her handbag in the floor, he tripped over it and his drinks and popcorn went flying.
He hates to even to miss the first seconds of a movie, so that was a complete disaster.
I always thought Peter was rather straight-laced and not very interesting but his conversation of the last few days has been very diverting. Being marooned at the Grozny Airport, the incident in the theatre, his love of westerns, popcorn and handball have painted quite a different portrait of him.
If Levon wins today, he sews up the tournament. Only Fabiano has a chance to win if everything works out for him.
Fabiano is asked the desert island question because he is a big movie fan. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino are his choices.
Jan says, “That is it for today. Levon Aronian is the winner. Can Carlsen’s haircut get any worse? Can Matthias Bluebaum avoid finishing last? Will Hou Yifan finish with a plus score? How many Wrestlemania results does Peter Leko know? Tune in tomorrow for the answers.”
I must say here that this has been a most enjoyable tournament. All the participants have been smiling, even when they lost. There has been a lot of joking around and the commentators were on top of their form – principally because Peter does this so rarely and Jan is just back from a playing vacation in Bangkok.
Contrast this with Sharjah Grand Prix 2017, which Eljanov said was one of the most boring tournaments he ever played in:
The commentators today are Peter, Jan and Rustam Kazimdzhanov.
Rustam comes in because the guys are discussing the renaissance of the Giuoco Piano and they are trying to see why Fabiano is using the particular move order today.
Rustam has a good sense of humor and an infectious laugh. Magnus’s hair is just as long and wild today as yesterday. When Jan says that Carlsen told him in an interview that he has a plan for his hair, Rustam replies: Some people don’t have a plan for their life and Carlsen has a plan for his hair!
For months the chess world made jokes about Anish Giri and all the draws he was making. Now the attention has shifted to Magnus’s hair.
Funny lines in the chat room:
- the hirsute man is back on stage – get the children away!
- he is hiding a computer in the hair
- can’t believe nobody has compared magnus to korobov yet
- magnus’s hair is an insult to Maurice Ashley
- fabiano escapes aronian. Aronian escapes vs Magnus. Magnus escapes vs the hairdressers – I don’t want to complete this cycle
________
Rustam says that recently in Russia they made a national poll of who was the strongest chess player of all time. The results surprised me. The first place with a huge cap between first and second is Alekhine first, ahead of Fischer, Kasparov, Karpov, Kramnik and Carlsen. Rustam wants to put Anand higher than he was on the list. Fischer, Kasparov, Anand would be his top three. On other lists, people have checked all the moves with a strong engine and find that Capablanca made the fewest mistakes and therefore the "best" player.
Talking about time trouble, Peter says he was 19 years old, he was playing against Ivanchuk. In 1999, at Linares, Peter made his 40th move and Vassily had twenty minutes left to make his but the position was not easy. He started thinking while Peter went to the restroom and then had a drink and came back and with seconds to go Ivanchuk is still thinking. He lost on time but instead of getting angry, said to Peter, “This is a very complicated rook endgame, let’s go and to another board and analyze it.” The public loves Chukky because he loves and admires the game of chess."
__________
Caruana blundered away a knight early on in the game and both commentators thought he would be resigning soon.
If Aronian wins today, that will be five won-games in a row. The guys mention Caruana having taken seven in a row in the Sinquefield Cup of 2014. Aronian won four in a row at Bilbao in 2009. Topalov won five in a row at St. Luis WC tournament in 2005. Fabiano won five in a row at the Dortmund Sparkassen in 2015 and Magnus had six consecutive victories at Tata Steel in 2015.
Rustam says that to win a number of consecutive games, you must be playing well and your opponents should be having a bad day. Also, you may have the luck of the draw for colours – having black against your weaker ones and white against the strong guys.
I myself wrote the following, thinking the result was now written in stone:
Garry Kasparov tweeted this in September of 2015:
Congratulations to Levon Aronian on his victory in the Sinquefield Cup! The chess world is a better place when Aronian is playing well!
That tells you all you need to know about Grenke 2017.
He ended with six out of seven.
Indeed, Aronian looked like he would walk away with the game but allowed Caruana to have queen and rook on his back rank. Then he went into a long think and finally white was a little better on move 46 even though he was a rook and knight down!
Certainly an endgame that the magazines will analyze for next month’s issue.
At the end of a long day, both Fabi and Levon came in and talked about the game, which ended in a draw.
Fabi said that he considered resigning after he played 22.Nxe6 and Levon played 23….c5. There were times when the commentators were afraid that black was going to be mated but in the end the players agreed to split the point.
Kibitzers on chessbomb wrote:
- Congrats to both!
- Thank god it’s over
- congrats to Levon, he had a great tournament
- lucky Caruana
________
Peter Leko had commentated twice before – at the WCC in Moscow 2012 and helped out in Zurich 2014 but this is the first time he was there from the first to last of a tournament. The viewers appreciated him very much so he will be back.
As far as playing, next week he plays for Padua in the Italian League and then he will go to the European Individual Championship in Minsk to qualify for the World Cup since he can no longer get in with rating.
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