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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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Levon Aronian - perseverence and brilliance! WoW!!
I have often felt that of those near the top for many years, Levon was the one best suited to being a World Chess Championship Challenger.....but he never seemed to quite rise to the occasion. He is often somewhat derided as a "Coffee House" player, because his penchant for some off-beat and risky moves. But he has always been much more than that...........
The playing hall is a tiered semi-circle with the players at the centre and four levels of benches for the spectators. The amphitheatre is in the Biltmore Hotel, which is right in the heart of the Tbilisi. The playing arena is arguably the most exquisite that you will ever see.
There is a bit of a ceremony at the first with Zurab in a dark suit. The two players are in dark suits. The table is specially designed for a good view for the cameras. No containers are allowed on that table.
The first game ended peacefully with a draw by repetition of position. The players discuss the game after and Aronian comes in for an interview.
Aronian confessed to being caught out in the opening, knowing he had nothing objective. "I wasn't expecting this d4. My reaction was a safe one, but I knew there was nothing. Black can play anyway. He can even make a long castle instead of Qe6."
he was asked why he always ties his shoelaces before a game. It is not a superstition, he buys his shoe size but in time they get loose. He doesn’t take care of his shoes as well he does with his pawns.
In a week he is getting married.
________
- First game drawn. That playing hall....wow.
Last edited by Wayne Komer; Sunday, 24th September, 2017, 09:03 AM.
It is 28°C in Tbilisi. The spectators are lightly attired. That is the same as in Toronto, which is having its highest readings of the year. In the Isle of Man Tournament, the players have jackets on for 14°C temperatures.
It seems so quiet with just two players after having a room full of people a week ago.
Yasser says that Ding has impressed him all through the World Cup. He and Robin van Kampen are presently discussing the position at move 34 with black to play. Probably a draw with Ding having to work for it.
Levon Aronian to play his 34th move
Robin and Yasser go through tons of variations.
Yasser is happy with the two games so far. It is not like some of the matches in the World Cup where the classical games were drawn in favour of going to the rapid. These are like World Championship games with each one hard-fought.
Yasser confesses that his worst day as a commentator was at Tata Steel 2015 with Giri playing So. The ending was queen and pawns and so complex that Yasser finally had to turn himself off and check the computer to see its evaluation. And this evaluation depended on lines 20 moves long!
Ding was lost but Lev let the win slip through his fingers.
________
During the long and difficult endgame, this joke, which I have not heard before, was posted on the chessbrah chat-room:
An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are each asked to compute the volume of a little red rubber ball. The mathematician finds the equation for the surface, performs a triple integral, and computes the volume. The physicist dunks the ball in a pool of water, and measures the volume of the displaced water. The engineer looks up the value in his Book of Little Red Rubber Ball volumes.
Last edited by Wayne Komer; Sunday, 24th September, 2017, 10:10 PM.
Robin says he is broadcasting from Kingston, Ontario near Queen’s University. Yasser is in Hilversum, Holland.
Robin is taking commerce courses. Two practical ones are data management for business intelligence and digital marketing.
Yasser says that he started a small business in the late ‘80s. It was called International Chess Enterprises which published the magazine Inside Chess and they also sold chess books and chess software. The problem at first was finding enough customers. As a former businessman then, he is intrigued by the big companies like google that data mine their customers and then produce ads based on their likes and needs.
Ding has been playing like his solid self and was never in trouble as black in this game.
After three games of classical chess, the score is Ding Liren-Aronian 1.5-1.5
________
On Ding Liren's escape in yesterday's game:
Aronian made one strong move after another and constantly posed his Chinese opponent with problems to solve. Every move had to played accurately by Ding in order to avoid defeat. The 24-year-old grandmaster did fare well until a certain point, but then went wrong. Mistakes in chess do not happen in vacuum. It was this incessant pressure from Aronian that made Ding go wrong. The biggest opportunity for Levon came on move 53. Levon had two choices in front of him - grab the pawn on f3 or move the knight to b3. With time running low on the clock, such decisions are extremely difficult to make. However, Aronian could have gained the full point by playing Nb3+.
Levon, however, couldn't calculate the consequences of Nb3+ accurately and hence went for the safer route with Nxf3. The position is still be winning, just not as clear as Nb3+. For Ding things were not at all bright. Not only had he lost a pawn, but he was down to his last few seconds. This is when the Chinese player made the decision of playing fast. And it worked. Within five moves, it was Ding who had three minutes as compared to Aronian playing in seconds. Somehow the pressure of defending a worse position for Ding had been converted into the pressure of winning a won game for Aronian.
Miraculously Ding Liren survived and he is yet to be beaten in the World Cup 2017 in Tbilisi.
Both Aronian and Liren dressed up for the finals, as we can see from the pictures. Liren seems to have casual shoes (maybe for comfort, OK), but at least he's got a shirt and jacket. Aronian is looking wonderful with his blue suit and light green shirt.
Who would have guessed? Aren't these guys full patch gypsies who can dress however the hell they want? With an army of poor chess players supporting them?
Anyone here still supporting the gypsy style?
Last edited by Mathieu Cloutier; Monday, 25th September, 2017, 08:40 PM.
Both Aronian and Liren dressed up for the finals, as we can see from the pictures. Liren seems to have casual shoes (maybe for comfort, OK), but at least he's got a shirt and jacket. Aronian is looking wonderful with is blue suit and light green shirt.
Who would have guessed? Aren't these guys full patch gypsies who can dress however the hell they want? With an army of poor chess players supporting them?
Anyone here still supporting the gypsy style?
We get it ... YOU clearly think players should be wearing a suit (+/- a tie, I guess)(+/- casual shoes, I guess). Unless you have more to add, perhaps you can give it a rest.
Earlier Aronian wore a cat shirt. Ding was asked by the organizers to lose the track suit, as he mentioned in one of the interviews. Of course neither was asked to change clothes a few minutes before the game. Probably because Armenia and China have some clout chess-wise.
Both Aronian and Liren dressed up for the finals, as we can see from the pictures. Liren seems to have casual shoes (maybe for comfort, OK), but at least he's got a shirt and jacket. Aronian is looking wonderful with is blue suit and light green shirt.
Who would have guessed? Aren't these guys full patch gypsies who can dress however the hell they want? With an army of poor chess players supporting them?
Anyone here still supporting the gypsy style?
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
We get it ... YOU clearly think players should be wearing a suit (+/- a tie, I guess)(+/- casual shoes, I guess). Unless you have more to add, perhaps you can give it a rest.
I'm just sitting there, casually observing what happens in one of the most important events in the chess calendar. No need to read too much into it.
Earlier Aronian wore a cat shirt. Ding was asked by the organizers to lose the track suit, as he mentioned in one of the interviews. Of course neither was asked to change clothes a few minutes before the game. Probably because Armenia and China have some clout chess-wise.
Ding was told to dress up. Just like Anton. Anton decided to complain and Ding decided to comply. Two equally talented players, one had to decide to leave and the other is still playing.
Last edited by Mathieu Cloutier; Monday, 25th September, 2017, 08:40 PM.
The commentators on the chessbrah channel are Yasser Seirawan and Eric Hansen. During a slow period of the game Yasser talks about his magazine Inside Chess and about James Tarjan and memories of Fischer. I shall give some excerpts after the game is finished.
- The R&P ending with gh vs. f is covered in 'Understanding Rook Endings' (p100)... which says it's usually a draw if the defending king is well placed.
- Levon looks like he could use a shotglass of 5-hour energy.
- yes, stamina is playing a role
- Ding is always tough for Aronian.
- Ding escaped again!
- Ding played this perfectly
- if Aronian plays chess like in this game he will not win the Candidates
The game today was a draw. On the chessbrah channel, Yasser reminisced and what he said was interesting enough for me to transcribe some of it.
Yasser – For me, watching a game in real time now and being able to interact with an audience is like wonderful science fiction. When I was growing up, one of the pleasantest memories of chess I have is of playing over the games of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. We would get the newspaper report with the game score and six of us would be sitting in the coffee shop and sharing our analysis, playing through the moves. To me that was really thrilling. Here we are doing the same thing with an audience of thousands and we have these chess engines in the background, humming away telling us their thoughts and we are telling the human audience what we think.
Eric (soliloquy, because Yasser is off making coffee) – I’m not a professional chess player in the sense that I make a living from playing chess. I play at the level of a professional and play professional tournaments. It is not my primary source of income. My priority is to play good tournaments but if other things come up I have to deal with them first. I generally lose money playing chess. I enjoy playing chess and playing good players but it other things that pay for my tournaments. I coach and do chess camps, have done a lot of work in St Louis, commentary, but playing is the least lucrative of those. I am only a professional in the fact that I try to play in strong tournaments. Other things pay for chess, I can’t just travel the world, playing tournaments.
Yasser, do people know the chess magazine that you started when you were in your late twenties? You were a board member and publisher.
Yasser – Anybody who has been involved in editing or publishing a chess magazine in any way understands what I mean. There are deadlines and pressure to get players to annotate their games. Despite all of that I had some really fun times. It was minisculey profitable, rather a labour of love. It was a different era, there was no Internet so how were you to get the top games? How could you be up to date?
The magazine Inside Chess ran from ‘89-‘90 for a dozen years. Then there was the writing on the wall that magazines and newspapers were in serious trouble.
There was a tournament at Las Palmas, a double round-robin featuring Kasparov, Anand, Topalov, Karpov and other great players. Garry won an unbelievable game against Veselin Topalov. And we watched the game live on the Internet. My editors John Donaldson and Michael Franett and myself, played over the game like in that tale about Fischer and Spassky. And we were like wow, the next issue of the magazine is going to be so cool because this tournament is so cool.
I came in the next day and Mike was there and he had this look like someone had died. He was white. I asked if everything was O.K. and he said that I had to see this. We went over to our super printer called Oracle. It kept printing and printing and finally got to twenty-four pages. It was all analysis by the World Champion Garry Kasparov on the game that had been played less than 24 hours before. I went, “Oh Mike, Garry came through, he annotated the game for us”. But Mike said, “No, Yasser, he annotated the game for his Internet site Kasparov Chess and it is downloadable for free.”
And I am holding solid gold and it is Garry annotating the game and, I thought, for us but it was all free on the Internet. But my magazine wasn’t to be printed for another two weeks and then it would take another week for it to show up in people’s mailboxes so there was a three-week lag between the time the game was played and the time it is held by the readers. We had to have subscriptions but here was Garry Kasparov’s annotations for free. How could you compete with that?
I was speaking to Garry after and he was raising money for Kasparov Chess and they spent twenty million dollars. They had offices in Tel Aviv, Moscow and a prime location in Manhattan. They had 20 to 30 people full-time. His company burnt through money with no problem but then the dot-com bubble burst. It was an amazing time.
Kasparov made me an offer to buy Inside Chess and hindsight being 20/20, I should have accepted. It would have been great for me personally.
______
Yasser – Jim Tarjan, a blast from the past, in 1979 we shared an apartment in Hollywood, California, we spent the summer of ‘79 preparing him for the biggest event of his career – the Interzonal in Riga. That was a massive 20-player tournament with adjourned games and free days and it lasted six weeks. If you were in the top, you qualified for the Candidates. The Soviet squad was Polugaevsky, Mikhail Tal and so forth.
Who would do the cooking? Of Hungarian origin, James had a paprika chicken that was damn good and a spaghetti sauce that was good too. We would make three gallons of spaghetti sauce that would last a week. Any meat dish that we had, we would add the spaghetti sauce. We worked really hard.
Americans were good in week-end tournaments but not extended tournaments like this one. Jim just ran out of gas there. The Soviet players had cars and drivers and apartments provided by the State. It was a real eye-opening experience for me.
In Hollywood, training, we would get up at 11, have toast and coffee and then jump in his car and go to Venice Beach. We would ogle the girls with cappuccinos in our hands, enjoying the sun. At 2 in the afternoon, we would go to a Taco stand and eat greasy enchiladas etc there. At 3, we would analyze until 7 and then have pasta and spaghetti sauce and then, at 10 in the evening, we would go into Hollywood and watch movies at an incredible string of movie theatres. I first saw Milos Foreman there. We would get home at 1 and then the day would repeat itself.
The next generation of strong chessplayers came along in about 1984 – the U.S. Championship in Berkeley - myself, Nick de Firmian, Larry Christiansen and John Fedorowicz – pushing Jim Tarjan aside and he decided to put his degree to use as a librarian and retired from chess. Now he has retired from his regular job three years ago and started in chess again.
About this time, during the summer of ’79, Bobby Fischer was living in Pasadena, California with Lina Grumette, an elderly widow, with a huge home and she invited chessplayers to come and play chess there in the evenings. Lina took care of Bobby – laundry, meals, a room... She journeyed to Iceland with him for the match with Boris Spassky.
Her best friend was Jacqueline Piatigorsky and they had stories about Bobby Fischer and I heard a lot about him in those days. I was dreaming at that time that he would return to chess and play on the U.S. Olympic team.
One story - Bobby had forfeited the second game with Spassky. Bobby decided to go to a movie with Lina Grumette and about half way through the movie he said to her, “I bet you are going to try to talk me into finishing the match”. She said, “No, I am just watching the movie”. He was rather p*ssed off about this and at the end of the movie, repeated his question, to which she replied, “I am a hundred per cent positive you are going to play and a hundred per cent positive you are going to win.” It was the perfect thing to say to Bobby at the perfect time. She made a huge contribution to his continuing the match. She was a mother-figure, much the way Lotis Key is to Wesley So now.
Ding Liren went undefeated until the final day of this tournament when Levon Aronian won both rapid games, his second World Chess Cup title and $120,000.
A bit of doggerel from a reader at chess.com
"Levon, Levon likes his money
He makes a lot they say
Spends his days counting
In a garage by the motorway"
--Elton John
Excerpts from Peter Dogger's final report on the match:
In game one. Aronian set the basis for his victory with this crushing win, in which he managed to surprise his opponent in the opening.
However, right after delivering the blow Ne5-g6, and Ding responding with Qf4-d2, something happened.
As it turns out, some loud construction noise could be heard in the playing hall, and on that moment Aronian lost all his focus.
"The first game was kind of not so difficult until the moment where the construction noise started," he said. "Then I lost my concentration and I allowed some unnecessary things because of the noise."
It rarely happens in rapid games, but Aronian even left the playing hall for a moment. "Then I went to the bathroom, washed my face, just relaxed and I think I played a decent game later on." 11 moves later it was over.
__________
At the closing ceremony, Ding said he was proud of his result. About his opponent, he graciously said: "I was a little bit upset but now I feel much better because throughout the match Levon Aronian played better than me so he deserved the win."
Aronian returned the favor: "I would like to compliment my opponent in the final. He's a player I could learn a lot from. His resilience, especially in the fourth game, was something very, very impressive. I don't think there are many players of the world elite that can hold that game with that ease."
All that's left for Aronian is three days to his marriage, for which he has little time to prepare ("I'll play blitz!") but surely the Mrs. Aronian to be will gladly accept this "time trouble" as funds for a nice honeymoon have been secured.
Thank you Wayne for your daily reports on the 2017 World Cup. This thread was the first place I turned to for information for the entire duration. It's great to have this type of curated content where you chose the best from the commentaries, highlighted and emphasized important points, and put everything in a standardized, easy-to-read form. I really appreciate the time and effort you took to achieve this, and look forward to your reports about the Candidates Tournament next year. :)
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