Dmitri Jakovenko, now the #1 ranked Russian and #5 in the world, redeemed his endgame cred today by grinding down Naiditsch in a deep and fascinating game. Yesterday he seemed nervous and lost a drawable endgame against Carlsen just when it looked like he had defended well. Today he swapped down out of a sharp theoretical Najdorf (see Karjakin-van Wely, Corus) and outplayed Naiditsch in a very difficult and instructive endgame. There are plenty of fantastic lines in the ending, which at first looks relatively easy for White and his passed b-pawn after 34.Re6! Naiditsch could have complicated things quite a bit with 47..Rb2+ 48.Kc3 Kh7!! 49.Bb4 Rb1! with Bf4 next. It seems impossible but Black's h-pawn is really quite annoying.

After 47..h4? 48.Bc3 the b2 square was covered. Both players queened and the game went into the third time control, but Jakovenko had calculated well and his king quickly found respite from the checks. Just for fun, a move of rare beauty would have occurred had Jakovenko blundered with 52.Rd8??, which looks like a pretty way to allow Black to queen and then give mate. But Black has 52..Rb2+!! and suddenly White is on the ropes. Sweet. Kudos to Argentine IM German Della Morte for pointing that out well in advance on the ICC. Thanks to Larry Christiansen for all his remarkable analysis as always.

That moved the Jakovenko back to an even score and dropped Naiditsch into the cellar. Carlsen still leads on +1 after comfortably holding Leko to the Hungarian's second straight short draw with the white pieces (25 moves, beating yesterday's 24). Leko continued without much success in his plot to imitate Kramnik's repertoire instead of his usual 1.e4. Yesterday it was the Catalan, today it was 1.Nf3 2.c4. Speaking of the man himself, Bacrot defended aggressively (..a5!?, ..g5!) against Kramnik's typical slow-roll in the QID. The Frenchman impressed by even having a tiny plus before ceding the draw. You don't see Kramnik's white pieces defused this capably very often.

The big showdown tomorrow in round three, Carlsen-Kramnik. Then Bacrot-Jakovenko and Naiditsch-Leko.

ICC Chess.FM New In Chess subscription trivia winner for round 2: Arv123. Q: "Three of the Dortmund players have never won their national championships. Name two of them." (Not only was Arv123 first to answer, in less than two seconds, but he named all three!)

It's go time in Dortmund. In memory of Michael Jackson they start out with a real Thriller in round one, Leko-Kramnik! Har har, I could go on all night. But I won't, because I am merciful. The other games are Carlsen-Jakovenko and Naiditsch-Bacrot. Games start at 9am EDT, 3pm local, but they are using a 15-minute broadcast delay as an anti-cheating measure, something I fully support. Although they haven't figured out a good way to deal with jumping to the end when the game is over. There will be a daily live link on the official site (above). There seem to be dueling official sites, btw. That one, plus this one and what appears to be a subsite of it. Weird.

I'm on ICC Chess.FM with the inimitable LarryC. Updates here after the round. Call the action. Or "action" since Leko hasn't beaten Kramnik in classical chess since their 2004 WCh match (shades of Kasparov's dominance over Anand post-1995 WCh match) and Kramnik hasn't won a classical game with black against anybody since 2006, one of the more remarkable stats in top chess. But hey, let's stay positive. A black win in his favorite event would be a heck of a way for Big Vlad to shake off seven months of rust.

UPDATE: A pretty slow day at the board from the spectating point of view, with a Berlin, a deep Marshall endgame, and a Catalan. You know you're in trouble when the Berlin game is where the excitement is. But that was the case today. Leko-Kramnik fulfilled one of the easier predictions I've made with a 24-move snoozer. Leko tried 1.d4 and tried to use Kramnik's favorite Catalan against him. Vlad was unimpressed and liquidated the queenside to reach a totally drawn endgame. The ambitious exchange sac offer 17.e3!? would have livened things up a bit, though it doesn't seem to promise more than equality for White.

Naiditsch-Bacrot was an endgame variation of the Marshall Gambit that both played on the other side recently. White gets such an infinitesimal advantage in these lines you're basically waiting around for Black to screw up. As LarryC put it, White might win two or three out of twenty of these with some luck, but with zero risk of a loss and that seems to be what many of today's players are happy with with white. Ugh. They politely played on for a bit in an opposite-colored bishop endgame before leaving Carlsen-Jakovenko as the only game in town.

The Berlin doesn't seem a natural fit for Jakovenko, but he's had success with it on both sides, indicating a gift for its desert-like maneuvering positions. (He lost to Svidler with it last month, but to be fair Svidler dodged the usual endgame with 4.d3.) Carlsen made steady progress, however, and Black had some tough choices to make when the rooks came off the board before the first time control. Jakovenko hadn't been in any time trouble but nerves seemed to get the best of him in his Dortmund debut. He let his time tick down and then made several poor decisions, avoiding a couple of natural attempts at a draw Larry looked at and ending up in a lost position. He passed up the chance to play ..c5 twice and after that he was going to be tortured for a long time at the very best. Instead it ended quickly with another dithering move, 41..Bd3. One nice drawing line: 37..c5 38.bxc5 Kxc5 39.h5 gxh5 40.gxh5 f6 41.h6 Bg8 42.Ne6+ Kd6! 43.Nf8 Ke7 44.h7 Bxh7 45.Nxh7 Kf7.

Round 2: Kramnik-Bacrot, Jakovenko-Naiditsch, Leko-Carlsen.

ICC Chess.FM New In Chess subscription trivia winner for round 1: Flaneur. Q: "The last time Dortmund used this format, a player outside the top 20 won ahead of Kramnik and Anand. Who?"

Hours after I posted the item on Nanjing Pearl Spring, Anand and Topalov disappeared from the event website and were replaced with "to be determined"! [The sharp-eyed Torrelio in the comments notes that if you click the first blank square you still get Topalov's picture. Hasty cover-up!] Maybe the organizers' announcements got a little ahead of their contracts? Inquiries as yet unanswered.

Revving up for dueling supertournaments in the coming days, one old and one new. Dortmund kicks off on July 2nd with Kramnik, Leko, Carlsen, Jakovenko, Bacrot, and Naiditsch. Three former winners there -- don't forget Naiditsch's clear first in 2005. He'll need seven more Dortmund titles to catch up with Vladimir Kramnik's collections. Last year, however, Leko took clear first in the second 'sprint' edition of Dortmund, just seven rounds, with +2. Kramnik, meanwhile, lost twice with his Petroff and finished -1.

This year the format is the overused six-player double all-play-all, which limits the influx of new blood but cuts down on hotel and travel costs. The purity of eliminating color imbalance is a nice feature, but I'd be happy to leave this stodgy format to Linares. Instead it's spreading like H1N1. At least we get ten rounds of action instead of the mere seven rounds as in the last few years.

Nice to see Jakovenko here, befitting his new status as world #5 on the new July rating list. The Grand Prix has been keeping him busy enough, but he hasn't had much in the way of invites to traditional events. I guess he's lucky that Kramnik doesn't really count as another Russian in Dortmund since he basically owns the joint. It'll be interesting to see Big Vlad in action since he hasn't played a classical game since his mediocre Olympiad performance last November. He was in devastating form in rapid chess in Baku last month.

Rounds begin at 9am EDT and I'll be kicking things off live on ICC Chess.FM with Larry Christiansen for rounds one and two.

Then on the 7th the inaugural Donostia-San Sebastian chess festival begins in Spain with no fewer than four round-robin events at the same time. Loek van Wely is in the B group! The official site just popped up here. Players in the top group, aka the "Donostia 2016 European Cultural City" tournament are: Karpov, Svidler, Nakamura, Movsesian, Kasimjanov, Ponomariov, Vachier-Lagrave, Vallejo Pons, Granda Zuñiga, San Segundo. (San Sebastian is a candidate city to be the 2016 European capital of culture, one of the reasons they are hosting this chess festival.) Pictures will be at this Flickr account, currently stocked with pics of the locale and older photos of the players. There's even a Twitter account, so add @donostiachess to your Tweetdeck for regular updates if you're into that sort of thing.

The field for the 2009 Nanjing Pearl Spring Grand Slam tournament is now complete. Bu Xiangzhi has been replaced by Wang Yue despite his respectable even score in last year's edition. But barring shocking developments, nobody will be paying much attention to anyone other than world champ Anand, world #1 Topalov, and world #3 wunderkind Magnus Carlsen. The rest of the field will be battling to get a share of the spotlight: Radjabov, Jakovenko, and Wang Yue. Topalov dominated last year's event. Start date is September 27, hard on the heels of the Bilbao Grand Slam final. Official site here.

Update: Hours after I posted this, Anand and Topalov disappeared from the Pearl Spring website and were replaced with "to be determined"! Maybe the organizers' announcements got ahead of their contracts?

I know my brain is decaying in my dotage now that I went and turned 40 earlier this month, but when did Ilyumzhinov's illegitimately inserted candidates event turn into matches? Well, I've been busy. Without any explanation on the page, FIDE has announced the regulations for "Candidates Matches 2010" on its homepage. That is, instead of a tournament, as had been mentioned repeatedly if not actually written down -- and of course instead of the original plan to have a candidates match between the winners of the World Cup and the Grand Prix. I love candidates matches the way the US football team loves choking against Brazil, but this still doesn't change the fact that this additional candidates phase is entirely unnecessary -- especially if sponsorship isn't already lined up.

The event schedule shows that the first two rounds of matches are only four games long, with the final lasting just six games. Tragic. The invitation list of eight remains the same, as discussed here many times. Kamsky (as loser against Topalov in the last candidates match), the loser of the upcoming (inshallah) WCh match between Topalov and Anand, the winner of this year's Nov-Dec World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, the top two finishers in the Grand Prix, two by rating (avg. Jul 2009 and Jan 2010 lists), and the preposterous "nominated player by the Organizer."

Unless UEP comes back into the organizing picture and makes Kramnik the obvious wildcard selection, it could be interesting if it comes down to the former world champ or the new hotness, Magnus Carlsen. But Carlsen, who dropped out of the Grand Prix, has the inside track as a rating qualifier. He'll be third on the July list behind Topalov and Anand, who don't factor in. Ivanchuk's horrific plunge on the upcoming rating list looks set to make him an unlucky loser again. Radjabov and Grischuk lead the GP standings right now, with two tournaments to play, but Aronian is in excellent position. He's also 4th on the rating list.

Maybe they can include a clause that says if they don't get sponsorship for these matches before a deadline they revert to the original plan and play a match between the GP and WC winners. Some day they will learn that having a predictable and transparent system is worth more in the long run than trying to make a buck on this ad hoc basis. By then we'll be picking feathers out of our bacon.

Speaking of the World Cup, I've been following the Latin American qualifying events over the past few days. So far Morovic of Chile, Rodriguez of Uruguay, Bruzon of Cuba, and Iturrizaga of Venezuela are in. Proud to say I've lost to two of them! (Coincidentally, Rodriguez won his key final game, a lovely one (see below), with 1.d4 d5 2.Bg5, which is what I played against him in my loss in 1994.) Cuba's Dominguez is already in by rating. The Pan American individual championship will send three more in July.

Whew, a crazy month. But Hurricane Garry has left the country and I have a few moments to play chess catch up before getting to all the follow-up to what has been a remarkable past week or so.

Vassily Ivanchuk took clear first in the third edition of this Romanian tournament. His +4 undefeated score put him a full point ahead of Boris Gelfand. A clear victory for the oldest players in the event. Shirov beat Nisipeanu in the final round to move back to +1 and a tie for 3-4 with Radjabov. Kamsky and Nisipeanu both finished with -4. Such a catastrophe might have been predicted for the local hope, who was giving up a lot rating points to the rest of the field. But Kamsky hasn't looked this fragile since the first few years or so of his comeback in 2004.

Ivanchuk started off with a win and then reeled of three straight in the middle to put it out of reach. There was only one decisive game in the final three rounds, but not from a lack of fighting spirit. But when you have three undefeated players it's not exactly a bloodbath. Only one loss was notched by someone not named Kamsky or Nisipeanu.

I've been trying to make a little sense of Radjabov's tournament. I've been critical of him in the past for being lackadaisical with the white pieces and occasionally coasting for long periods. Here he was pushing but just didn't get anywhere. He got in most of his sharp black repertoire, the Sveshnikov, Dragon, and King's Indian, but only for draws. He tried some interesting things with white and had his chances, other than a complete whiff against Nisipeanu's Scandinavian. (Nisipeanu lost a remarkable game with it earlier this year in Budva to Stevic.) In the final round Radjabov may have been taken aback by Ivanchuk's 6..Nbd7 in the Najdorf, a rarely-seen bird at these altitudes, and got little to show. Radjabov even added a few rating points.

Dortmund starts on July 2 and San Sebastian (Svidler, Movsesian, Nakamura, Karpov, etc.) a few days after that. I'll be back hosting on ICC Chess.FM for Dortmund, with a leisurely 9am starting time. Players are Kramnik, Leko, Carlsen, Jakovenko, Bacrot, and Naiditsch. It's yet another double round-robin with six players. (Bazna showed one of the weaknesses of this format. When someone's out of form, or two someones, it really distorts the table.) Before that, the World Open begins in Philadelphia on the 29th and should attract the usual strong crowd.

From the man with the best hair in chess journalism, Macauley "Anchorman" Peterson at the ICC Chess.FM blog, the real scoop on Hikaru Nakamura's invite to Corus A 2010. Go there now for all the linkies to work.

American champion Hikaru Nakamura has been invited to the prestigious Corus A tournament in Wijk aan Zee (January 15-31, 2010).

Nakamura (ICC: Smallville) broke the news first in an interview for Chess Talk with John Watson, which will be released for on-demand playback next Tuesday, June 29th on Chess.FM (for ICC members only).

The past six weeks have been tremendous for Nakamura, whose U.S. Championship win in Saint Louis got him back over 2700 FIDE. In fact, with Gata Kamsky struggling in Bazna, Romania, Nakamura looks poised to surpass him as the top rated American in the world.

Macauley phoned Hikaru for a quick chat on Monday night to confirm the news.

For US fans this adds some drama to all the remaining Corus A invite announcements. Will the American champ face the usual rogue's gallery of top-tenners? Will Anand, Topalov, and Kramnik be back this year? Nakamura's inclusion in this traditional event will also test my theory that having someone with his large American online fan base will have a significant impact on coverage traffic. Like any star doing his thing, Nakamura also has his share of vocal detractors. But they'll be watching eagerly, too. And on the internet nobody knows (or cares) whether the unique visitors are there to cheer or jeer. It's about putting butts in the seats, as the saying goes, or in this case, eyeballs on the screen. And I have no doubt that in that category Nakamura plays at the 2800 level.

I hope the USCF site gets out ahead of their champion's second-half star turn with some serious promotion and coverage. This is their chance to run with something big instead of running it over. Contests, fantasy chess, win a trip to Corus to carry Hikaru's luggage, whatever. I'm sure the savvier ICC folks will get into this sort of thing as well. Smallville is as close to a home-grown star as the ICC could have.

Ivanchuk took another big step toward adding another trophy to his creaking shelves in Bazna. He beat Shirov to move to an impressive +4 score and a full-point lead with three rounds to play. In today's 7th round Ivanchuk has black against the only player with a realistic chance of catching him, Boris Gelfand. Radjabov finally notched a win, handing Kamsky's Caro-Kann its second consecutive loss and its hapless operator his third. The American now sits in clear last place on -4.

Shirov played a, well, Shirovian piece sacrifice out of the Grunfeld against Ivanchuk. The fascinating imbalance continued through a rich game of blow and counterblow. It looks like Black was very close to reaching a draw several times, but Ivanchuk managed to keep enough material on the board to keep winning chances. 67..g3!, threatening to take the knight, looks like a forced draw. 68.Kf1 g2+ (or even ..e2+) with ..f3 coming is the trick. Black will take the knight with check or the king gets to the h-pawn. Shirov hesitated one move and was lost.

A side-note to Kamsky's fall is that it now looks certain Hikaru Nakamura will become the top-rated American player on the July FIDE list. (Everyone's favorite rating-porn site, the Live List, confirms this forecast.) After his US championship win and his 7.5/8 in the French League Nakamura will clock in at 2710 in July while Kamsky may drop out of the 2700 club entirely. I'm not sure how surprised to be about his downturn. The mass of preparation he must have done for the Topalov candidates match has to be balanced against the psychological blow of losing it. Mindless mind-reading aside, there's no reason to doubt Kamsky will be back in shape soon enough.

For Nakamura, the biggest challenges are yet to come. In a few weeks he heads to San Sebastian with Movsesian, Svidler, and Ponomariov. At year's end comes a double dip that could really launch the still-young American into the world elite. In December he plays in London with Carlsen and Kramnik. Just a few weeks later (!) he heads to freezing Wijk aan Zee and the illustrious Corus A group, an invite he has coveted and has justly earned. Just surviving that gauntlet with his skin intact will be impressive, but of course Nakamura never plays just to survive, so excitement will come one way or another.

When Ivanchuk scraped bottom with -4 at MTel in May (-5 until a last-round win), there was much talk about how exhausted he was, how he'd been playing too much and needed a break, etc. He certainly had been playing a remarkable amount, but I tried to point out that 1) it wasn't much more than he always seems to be playing these days and 2) his results fluctuate wildly without any apparent correlation to frequency. Now, without a break after MTel, squeezing in two rapid events, Ivanchuk is leading the nearly as strong Bazna tournament, +3 undefeated after six of 10 rounds for a 2900 performance rating. Exhausted!

True, two of his wins have come against the tail-ending local, Nisipeanu, but it's still quite a turnaround. Fellow 40-something Boris Gelfand is in second place a half-point back. Then comes Shirov on +1. This tournament could be part of a senior tour if it weren't for Radjabov, the only player in the field under 30. He's played all draws so far. Kamsky is having a very rough time of it with three losses without a victory to sit in last place with Nisipeanu. He's lost twice to Shirov, though neither was as ugly as his hanging a rook to Ivanchuk in the fifth round. It was an unusual tactic, at least, coming soon to the back-rank section of your next tactics book.

With apologies to the Beastie Boys. FIDE has a knack for press releases that make things less clear. They've really raised it to an art form. The latest is a report on the Presidential Board Meeting (apparently these things are capitalized) held over the last few days in Krakow. There were some important, or at least impactful, items on the agenda but there are many tea leaves to be read to figure out what's actually going on and what was decided.

The recent back-and-forth on changing the K-factor used in calculating the rating list has been booted to some nameless committee to "clarify all aspects and consequences of a possible change." That's what was supposed to happen already. So no change right now, unfortunately. Actually it's only really worth changing the K-factor if you also update the frequency of the list. Quarterly lists will look jarringly random otherwise. (For those who don't want to bother reading up on it, the short version is that K is how many rating points change hands in each game. The higher it is, the more dynamic the list.) The core of this debate is the point of a rating list. Historical strength or recent performance? Of course we can track both trivially enough, and we should. Chessplayers are fascinated by ratings and FIDE's perpetual squandering of the value and interest of the rating lists and data is ridiculous.

Of more pressing interest, but even more cryptic, is the announcement that FIDE has accepted the "new regulations" for the ongoing world championship cycle. By this I assume (and assume is all I can do since they don't actually specify) they mean adding Ilyumzhinov's new candidates tournament to further slow things down and give a few reliable donors a chance to sweeten the coffers.

Speaking of coffers, David Kaplan's name makes another appearance, this time joined to "Chess Lane," the latest imaginary company concocted by Ilyumzhinov and his buddies to facilitate the shell game that has long been the business development [sic] branch of FIDE, going back at least to the Artyom Tarasov days. Chess Lane and Kaplan have eaten most of Global Chess after Bessel Kok came to his senses and bailed out of the sinking Grand Prix ship. Kaplan was named "Development CEO" of FIDE in Nov. 2007 and though we know little about him, to come out of nowhere to take such an obscure position you have to have money, want money, or want to clean money, or all of the above. Or maybe he's just another selfless "industrialist" with a thing for chess. Of the fewer than one dozen mentions of his name on the FIDE site since that time, this nice one from April 08 when Kaplan gave "a presentation on the progress that Chess Lane has been making, which included many original ideas." Period! Is anything actually being developed? What progress?

Yesterday's press release says the PB "acknowledged and discussed the proposal of David Kaplan, FIDE Development CEO, about the establishment of a new Internet portal centered around chess activities and the creation of a Chess News Agency. In relation to these developments, FIDE will enter into negotiation with Chess Lane company."

Gee, a chess web portal and a news agency, how 1994. Sarcasm aside, of course these are things FIDE should have done -- and actually has announced in various forms -- long ago. Professionalizing coverage, first of official FIDE events and then offering coverage packages and establishing minimum standards for elite events. The hodgepodge of coverage, or lack thereof, from event to event is disgraceful. The Grand Prix series coverage has moved in the right direction, although another thing the PB press release hints at is the demise of the GP. Skip the hackneyed "portal" concept though, and explain what this new site will be beyond what FIDE.com already provides, or could provide.

In DC with Garry yesterday for meetings, I hooked my G1 into a wifi network at an office building near Dupont Circle. Among the various networks to appear was one with an amusing SSID. There are several consular offices in the building but I don't think that third one from the top is there anymore. Or is there something we don't know?! Nice to see an admin with a sense of humor. Either that or if you see a black helicopter circling my house, please give me a ring.

Meetings were very interesting, not always the case. In three weeks Obama is headed to Russia for the first time and both what he says and with whom he meets there will be watched very closely. And of course every faction and clique in the US political scene wants a "Russia message" now, so people who would barely return my calls a month ago are now beating down the doors. Good, but silly, since you know we'll be back on the caller ID screen list by August even if we help out.

While I'm off-topic, hello to the several people who came up and said hello to me at the Lincoln Center screening of "Holy Fire" the other day. (Mostly while waiting to get Garry's picture or autograph, but I'll take it.)