The Week in Chess

The FIDE World Cup in Tromso settled the quarter final lineup after four games went to playoffs. After two rapid games Dmitry Andreikin, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Peter Svidler went through but Evgeny Tomashevsky only progressed after a "crazy" match against Alexander Morozevich went to blitz.

Evgeny Tomashevsky found a way to get past Alexander Morozevich after four rapid and two blitz games where he found away to win with black in the 10 minute plus 10 seconds a move game. After two draws in the 25 minute plus 10 second a move games Tomashevsky was completely winning the first of the 10 minute games but then blew the entire advantage and lost. To cope with the rest of the games he said he mentally told himself he was playing "for fun" He stretched second the game out (quickly a heavy piece ending) so long that Morozevich lost patience and tried to immediately force a draw missing a move that eventually gave Tomashevsky the advantage. Then Morozevich came close to a draw, Tomashevsky took risks and after further errors got an extra e-pawn in a queen ending that still was hard at this time control. He got the win in 169 moves and well over an hour. Then in the first blitz game Tomashevsky turned round a passive position with black to counter-attack and win. The second game saw Tomashevsky get a big advantage after 20.Bh3! but that wasn't the end of it, he missed out and out wins on move 31 and 36 before drawing by repetition rather than give mate (not on purpose). Tomashevsky called the match crazy and that Kamsky his next opponent was also a winner after such a marathon effort. In spite of his agitated state at the end of the match he found time to think of his opponent "I can't imagine what Sasha [Morozevich] must be feeling.", classy.

Peter Svidler was again not impressed with his own play against Le Quang Liem, he seemed in quite some trouble in the first rapid game before getting active and obtaining a draw. The second game was level for a very long time but Svidler first won bishop and knight for rook and then in a still more or less equal position found a way eventually to cause his opponent real problems. Svidler's play in the latter part of the game was pretty impressive.

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave got into a bit of a mess against Boris Gelfand in their first rapid game after playing 21.f3 completely missing the possibilty of 22...Qg3 giving Gelfand a substantial advantage but Gelfand didn't follow up correctly and Vachier-Lagrave ended up winning. He drew the second game reasonably comfortably.

Dmitry Andreikin was called a dark horse to win the event by Hikaru Nakamura and he won pretty convinvingly 2-0 against Sergey Karjakin who hadn't really shone in progressing in probably a comparitively easy draw so far.

Round 5 Fri 23rd Aug Tomashevsky vs Kamsky, Svidler-Andreikin, Caruana-Vachier, Kramnik-Korobov.