The Chess World Cup 2017

[Erik Malmsten]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Thanks Wayne, you're Canada's international news columnist.

[Paul Leblanc]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Let me also add my thanks

[Gordon Ritchie]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Thanks, Wayne. Much appreciated.

[Kerry Liles]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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. :)

Agree 100%.

[Hans Jung]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Yes, thanks for all the reporting you do Wayne, its much appreciated!

[Bob Armstrong]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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. :)

Ditto - Wayne puts a lot of volunteer effort into his posts, and the rest of us benefit hugely from his efforts!

[Vadim Tsypin]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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. :)

[Wayne Komer]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

The Chess World Cup 2017

September 27, 2017

Round 7, Playoff
Rapid Games
25+10

Game 5, Sept. 27, 2017
Aronian, Levon – Ding, Liren
D43 QGD, Semi-Slav, Hastings variation

1.c4 Nf6 2.Nf3 e6 3.Nc3 d5 4.d4 c6 5.Bg5 h6 6.Bxf6 Qxf6 7.Qb3 Nd7 8.e4 dxe4 9.Nxe4 Qf4 10.Bd3 e5 11.O-O Be7 12.Rae1 exd4 13.Bb1 O-O 14.Ng3 Bd8 15.Qd3 g6 16.h4 Nf6 17.h5 g5 18.Ne5 Ba5 19.Ng6 Qd2 20.Ne7+ Kg7 21.Qb3 Qf4 22.Rd1 Bb6 23.Ngf5+ Bxf5 24.Nxf5+ Kh8 25.g3 Qg4 26.Nxh6 Qxh5 27.Kg2 d3 28.Qc3 Kg7 29.Nf5+ Kg6 30.Rh1 1-0

Game 6, Sept. 27, 2017
25+10
Ding, Liren – Aronian, Levon
D38 QGD, Ragozin variation

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.Nc3 Bb4 5.cxd5 exd5 6.Bf4 c6 7.e3 Bf5 8.Be2 O-O 9.O-O Be7 10.Nh4 Bg6 11.Nxg6 hxg6 12.Qb3 Qb6 13.Qc2 a5 14.g4 Nbd7 15.g5 Ne8 16.e4 dxe4 17.Nxe4 Qd8 18.h4 Nb6 19.Be5 Nd5 20.Bg4 Kh8 21.Rae1 Nef6 22.gxf6 gxf6 23.Bh2 f5 24.Bxf5 gxf5 25.Qd1 Rg8+ 26.Kh1 Rg4 27.Ng3 Rxh4 28.Nxf5 Rh7 29.Nxe7 Nxe7 30.Re5 Nf5 31.Rfe1 Qh4 32.Re8+ Kg7 33.Rg1+ Kf6 0-1

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.

https://www.chess.com/news/view/levo...fide-world-cup

[Kerry Liles]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Congratulations to Levon Aronian for winning the World Cup in style!

as a footnote, Aronian is marrying Arianne Caoili in 3 days...

[Hans Jung]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

Congratulations to Levon Aronian for winning the World Cup in style!

[Wayne Komer]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

The Chess World Cup 2017

September 26, 2017

Final, Round Seven
Game Four

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.

[Wayne Komer]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

The Chess World Cup 2017

September 26, 2017

Final (Round Seven)
Game Four

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.

Round 7, Game 4, Sept. 26, 2017
Ding Liren – Aronian, Levon
D39 QGD, Ragozin, Vienna variation

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.Nc3 Bb4 5.Bg5 dxc4 6.e4 h6 7.Bxf6 Qxf6 8.Bxc4 c5 9.O-O O-O 10.e5 Qd8 11.Ne4 cxd4 12.Qe2 Bd7 13.Rfd1 Nc6 14.Ng3 Bc5 15.a3 Ne7 16.Ne4 Bb6 17.Nxd4 Ng6 18.Qh5 Qh4 19.Qxh4 Nxh4 20.a4 Ng6 21.a5 Bxd4 22.Rxd4 Bc6 23.b4 Nxe5 24.b5 Bxe4 25.Rxe4 Nd7 26.Rd4 Nc5 27.Rad1 Rfc8 28.h4 Kf8 29.h5 Ke7 30.Rg4 Rg8 31.Be2 b6 32.Bf3 Rac8 33.axb6 axb6 34.Ra1 Rc7 35.Bc6 f5 36.Rg3 Kf7 37.Rd1 Ra7 38.Rg6 Ra3 39.g4 fxg4 40.Rxg4 Rh3 41.Be4 Nxe4 42.Rxe4 Rxh5 43.Rd7+ Kf6 44.Rd6 Re5 45.Rxe5 Kxe5 46.Rxb6 g5 47.Rb7 h5 48.b6 h4 49.Rf7 Rd8 50.b7 Rd1+ 51.Kg2 Rb1 52.f3 1/2-1/2

Chessbomb kibitzers

- 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

- draw agreed

- see you at the tiebreaks!
________

Playoffs/Tie Breaks tomorrow

(To be continued)

[Mathieu Cloutier]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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.

[Mathieu Cloutier]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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.

[Tom O'Donnell]

Re: The Chess World Cup 2017

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?