It's beginning to look like Peter Svidler prepared for Khanty-Mansiysk by reading the works of Stokely Carmichael because he's all about Black Power, baby! Check out this line of the Russian champ's games with the dark pieces.

Note that those last four in a row are classical wins. Insane and amazing. Kasparov had five black wins in a row at Linares, 1999 (Ivanchuk, Adams, Topalov, Svidler (!), Anand) and the fact that I remember that at all shows the rarefied ground Svidler is treading on here. He was helped in his latest effort by Alexander Grischuk's typically self-destructive time management -- a term that shouldn't really be used with Grischuk. It's like referring to Enron's financial management or my own calorie management. We often see Ivanchuk do this, too, and occasionally Kamsky, leaving themselves so little time on the clock that it's virtually irrelevant what they do on the board. Grischuk was down to a minute with 14 moves to play in a sharp position, as close to hopeless as could be imagined, especially against a phenomenally accurate player like Svidler. 24..Na4 is a wonderful move. So paradoxical and patient, moving away from the action.

Tension doing what it does to the human brain, the chess in these events is rarely what you come for. Yesterday's spectacular Svidler combo against Kamsky is now the only KO game I can remember, give or take. But they do delivery drama in spades. The ups and downs of the tiebreaks bring thrills and spills and it's the rare game that is won start to finish. Only three of eight fourth round matches were decided without the extra day of play.

The quarterfinals: Polgar-Svidler, Ponomariov-Gashimov, Ivanchuk-Radjabov, Navara-Grischuk. Pono knocked Gashimov out in the quarters in 2009 in tiebreaks.

Radjabov seems to have found his stroke in Khanty-Mansiysk and has yet to go to tiebreaks. He took out the solid Jakovenko to move into the quarters. Radjabov works hard and has one of the most dynamic repertoires around with the black pieces. He's turned over plenty of mossy stones in recent years, bringing the King's Indian and ..f5 Ruy Lopez to prominence. But with white he has had floundered, resulting in the highest draw rate among the elite. He wins just 28% of his white games, compared to the top-20 average of around 40%. There's no way to explain it, but he may have struck gold by employing his dynamic gifts in the amorphous English and Reti systems instead of boring himself with small theoretical advantages. His wins over Negi and Jakovenko in K-M were classic triumphs of maneuvering and confusion. It reminds me of how Nakamura went to Canada and added a dose of Duncan Suttles to his bag of tricks. Avoiding theory and relying on creativity, energy, and strength can be impressive, though it can also be construed (and misconstrued) as a cop-out for not working hard. This clearly isn't Radjabov's issue since he puts in a lot of time on his black openings.

Svidler also went through without tiebreaks in the match of the round. He beat 2007 World Cup winner Kamsky in a Ruy Lopez in their first game. In the second the newly-crowned Russian champion uncorked one of the best combinations you'll see, the gorgeous 26..Re2!! deflection rook sac. As I'm sure everyone figured out eventually, 27.Qxe2 loses to the Marshallesque 27..Qg3! The deflection was necessary because otherwise the knight could come back to c6 to block the bishop. An extraordinary and lovely combination. Very sad to see Kamsky out already. The vagaries of the KO guarantee this will happen regardless of who is on form, one of its serious drawbacks. The only other match to avoid tiebreaks was our Ukrainian Cinderella Zherebukh finally turning back into a pumpkin against Navara in two lopsided games.

Polgar might have gone through the tiebreaks faster had she not decided an in impromptu opening experiment against Dominguez. But just reaching tiebreaks at all was an achievement for Polgar, requiring as it did a win with black on demand after the Cuban won the first game nicely. B+R vs R is tough even at the GM level and even with time on the clock. It took her a while, but she eventually brought home the tying win. To further add to the melodrama, the position actually repeated three times; Dominguez could have claimed a draw before playing 107.Rh2. But of course recognizing that and having the sang froid to claim while on nothing but increment for so long is impossible to imagine. White won the first four tiebreak games, and I'm pretty sure Polgar won't be playing the Scandinavian again any time soon. Instead of her usual Sicilian, which brought her victory in the classical, she decided to surprise Dominguez with 1..d5 twice, and lost both times from unattractive positions. Then she went back to the Sicilian in the blitz and won.

Ponomariov also needed to win with black to stay alive, against Dominguez's countryman Bruzon. After drawing the two classical games, they swapped wins twice. Ponomariov's must-win with black was a tribute to his nerves and his technique. Nielsen's valiant run ended against Gashimov after four tiebreak games. European champ Potkin also fell to Elo's blade at last, losing to his countryman Grischuk's King's Indian. Those positions are often ugly for black for a while, and Grischuk doesn't have a lot of experience with the KID, but he turned the tables impressively in the second tiebreak game to take the match. Ivanchuk outplayed Bu in both tiebreak games, winning both in under 30 moves.

On now to the Matches that Matter. Three of the four semifinalists get invites to the candidates matches. No rest for the weary. Ponomariov has played 20 games in Khanty-Mansiysk. His opponent Gashimov, twelve. Radjabov has played the minimum of eight while Ivanchuk has needed tiebreaks in his last two matches. Polgar is the lowest rated player left, at 2701 on the latest list. Underrated a bit, I'd say! Navara is a few points above her. The other six are Usual Suspects, regular visitors to the top ten all. Enjoy the show.

The last time Judit Polgar made a deep run in a FIDE World Cup / FIDE KO Championship we were still in the 20th century. She cruised to the fifth round in Las Vegas, where she lost to eventual winner Alexander Khalifman's amazing run of form. Other than that trip, she has usually underperformed these events, losing early to underdogs Almasi and Milov. The 2004 and 2007 events corresponded with the arrival of her two children and in 2009, at the last World Cup, she lost to another eventual winner, Gelfand, in the third round. Now she's into the sweet 16 once more and clearly in good form, though it will take more time to see if she can fulfill a 2007 interview statement that she could work her way back into the top 10.

We know what Sergey Karjakin would say about it. In their first game, the top seed had his Berlin Wall torn up by Polgar faster than you could sing "Winds of Change" in a German accent. The Berlin is generally popular these days, but it is also trotted out as a sort of antidote to aggressive attackers like Polgar (and, famously, Kasparov). That may just be a myth since her performance rating against the stodgy queenless position is higher than her actual rating and she beat Topalov's Berlin last year. Karjakin must have been encouraged by the 15-move non-game she played against his Berlin at the Olympiad last year, but he wasn't so lucky this time. I don't know enough about Berlin theory to comment on Karjakin's nominal novelty 12..Bb7. All these positions look the same to me and they all make me want to kill myself. The minute shuffling of the minor pieces, the mincing steps of the queenside pawns, it's a horrific business.

Maybe it's as simple as Kasparov's jest in the latest New In Chess regarding Karjakin's (!) recent win over Kramnik's Berlin in the Russian Ch: wait until e6 is covered three times and then play e6! Polgar did play this now-typical sac, pioneered by Kasparov against Kramnik at Astana, 2001. But this time it was for clear purposes, or clearance purposes, allowing her bishop to get behind the lines on the queenside. This all seemed far too simple, but Polgar took her extra pawn and marched it down the board as easy as you please, undeterred by the opposite-colored bishops Karjakin may have been relying on to save his bacon. Their second game was another Ruy Lopez, no Berlin from Polgar, a long theoretical line that was seen in, wait for it, Polgar-Carlsen, Biel 2007. 26.Qe1 was probably White's last best chance at an advantage. After that passed, Black held steadily and the top seed of the World Cup was out. Polgar will face Dominguez for a trip to the quarters. If she beats the Cuban there's no way she can make it to St. Louis in time for the "Kings vs Queens" event she is scheduled to headline with Nakamura and Karpov.

Second-seeded Ivanchuk also lost in the first game of the round, with white to Sutovsky. This set up some drama for the return game, especially when Sutovsky decided that the best defense was a maniacally sacrificial opening against Ivanchuk's Pirc. The old "the best way to play for a draw is to play for a win" was taken a bit too far in this case, methinks. The Israeli GM did have his chances, but he faltered in the complications and Ivanchuk did not. Chucky duly won both rapid games to escape elimination. The strangest match may have been the highlight duel between Morozevich and Grischuk. Grischuk beat Moro's French in the first game and in the second, after 12 uninspired theoretical moves, Morozevich tested his opponent's hearing by offering a draw. Incredible. Sure the position is dull, but queens are on the board, why not play some chess when the alternative is heading home? Are the delights of Khanty-Mansiysk so tempting? Grischuk now faces another countryman, Potkin, who eliminated another strong Russian, Vitiugov. Ivanchuk meets Bu Xiangzhi.

David Navara made news in his match with Moiseenko with a touch-move kerfuffle in their second game that has made news only because of Navara's decision to offer his opponent a draw in a winning position as compensation. This exchange has been hailed as the greatest act of sportsmanship since Lance Armstrong agreed to ride the Tour de France with one testicle. From the reported details, and without seeing a video of the touch-move, this seems more than a little overblown. It sounds like Navara clearly accidentally touched the king next to the bishop he wanted to move, an obvious case of j'adoube. For Moiseenko to make a serious case over such a touch would be bizarre. Navara went on to outplay his opponent over a long game and, only then, with the win at hand in Q v R, did he offer a draw since he was wracked with guilt over the touch-move incident. Having done nothing wrong, Navara punished himself by giving up a well-earned half-point that would have put him through to the next round. Anyone who has met Navara, or even read his commentary, knows that the Czech lad is a tender soul, reserved and humble to a degree that makes you wonder if he will replicate Akiba Rubinstein's habit of moving and then sitting in the corner so as not to disturb his opponent. (As with so much about the players of yore, Donaldson and Minev's words should be taken to heart. "Most stories concerning Rubinstein are at best half truths, which have become so embellished over time that they bear little resemblance to what actually transpired.") I'm not going to completely rain on the sportsmanship parade, but Navara would have done nothing wrong to take the point and every player I've spoken with so far agrees. Anyway, tempest, teapot, and Navara went through after four tiebreaks to meet Zherebukh.

Most of the first tiebreak games were won by black, paving an easy road for Ivanchuk, Kamsky, Ponomariov, Nielsen, Bruzon and Potkin. Svidler won with first with white against Caruana, holding on to a pawn with superlative accuracy. Kamsky played an inspired exchange sac in the first tiebreaker against Nepomniachtchi. It ended up in a drawn rook endgame that, like so many drawn rook endgames in these KO cauldrons, was lost with a beginner mistake. Defend from the side until you can't, only then switch to behind the pawn. Of course Nepo knows that, but as we've seen many times, these events melt the brain. Dominguez went all the way to the armageddon game after a set of curiously short draws in the blitz. With white the Cuban demolished Lysyj to move into a match with Polgar. Our tournament dark horse was officially anointed this round, 18-year-old Ukrainian Yaroslav Zherebukh. He eliminated Mamedyarov in tiebreaks, first winning a Najdorf Sicilian with white in good style and then holding the return game. Zherebukh's 4th-round match with Navara is a slight step up from his recent events, which include failing to move on in the Ukrainian championship semifinal and a Lvov scholastic blitz tournament.

To recap, here's the sweet 16: Polgar-Dominguez, Svidler-Kamsky, Ponomariov-Bruzon, Gashimov-Nielsen, Bu-Ivanchuk, Radjabov-Jakovenko, Zherebukh-Navara, Grischuk-Potkin. Kamsky-Svidler would make for a worthy final match, a shame one of them will go out so early.

But it's not so great for chess. Rapids are often fun, the lack of time and impact on the rating list allow the players to take creative liberties they might otherwise shy away from. But mostly it's a simple equation of less time to think resulting in inferior moves. Rapid is probably at its best in casual events like the Botvinnik Memorial show that just completed in Moscow. Its worst aspects come out when pressure is added, such as at the World Cup in Moscow. The idea, often touted by Kirsan and others despite decades of evidence to the contrary, that rapid chess is the sponsor-friendly savior of the chess world needed to be buried long ago. FIDE has been trotting out these giant KO circuses since 1997 and their host sites have become increasingly distanced from the real world of commercial sponsorship. Instead of learning, FIDE seems to be saying that if we just cannibalize the sport more, that if we just remove more of what makes chess special, it will become a big deal like tennis or poker.

This, of course, is moronic in both directions. One, chess isn't going to be a big mass-market hit no matter how stupid they try to make it. Two, dumbing down an intellectual pastime to make it more "exciting" is a catastrophe. You push away the people you should be attracting, those who are interested in associating their city, company, or brand with the world's premier mind sport. And you will still never attract a significant number of the mainstream sports fans who have no interest in mind sports. No matter how much Kirsan and his pals try to destroy it, the image of chess is too strong for that. So we may as well make the best of it and go with our strengths. Plus, the huge scholastic push going on worldwide will continue to raise all boats, if slowly.

So, there was some rapid chess in Moscow with the four top-rated players in the world. World champ Anand, whose legendary rapid prowess has taken some blows lately, took clear first place with 4.5/6, though few of the games were gems fit for a crown. To be fair, according to the event description the players were interrupted during the games to talk to the audience about the position. This would be bad enough in classical, but in rapid it's akin to stopping the 200m race after 100m to ask questions of the runners and then starting them off again. "So Mr. Bolt, how do you think the race is shaping up so far?" "Well, pant pant, I got out of the blocks well, pant pant, and was really ready to turn on the jets when, pant pant, I had to stop and talk to you." Of course that's not realistic. Usain Bolt wouldn't be breathing hard after just 100m. But you get my drift, and it was pretty clear the players at the Botvinnik Memorial were in the same boat.

They did play with the great deal of verve and imagination, it's just that such creativity should be tested in the fires of accuracy to make for great chess, and accuracy requires concentration. Aronian's win over Carlsen today involved two speculative exchange sacs and wonderfully sustained pressure on the white position. Great stuff, maybe even brilliant. But had Carlsen played 28.f4, with e5 and f5 to follow, Aronian's plan might have looked quite a bit less brilliant. That was just the start of Mr. Carlsen's Very Bad Day, the first of three losses to go with one on the first day to put the world #1 into a winless last place with 1.5/6. Ouch. The frustrated Carlsen went from bad to worse when he tried to shake Kramnik with 1.Nf3 b5!?. He only succeeded in frustrating his own development and Big Vlad rolled through the black position like a Soviet tank through Czechoslovakia in 1968. I enjoyed the calm rook lift 13.Re3 against Black's unprotected kingside, even though the computer ruins things by pointing out 13.Qa4 won material. 13..Bxc3 14.Bxd7! Nc5 15.Bxc8 Nxa4 16.Bxb7 Rb8 17.bxc3 Rxb7 18.Be7 picks off the exchange. Ta-dah! Not a line that would pass a Turing test, to be sure.

Aronian has had a surprising amount of success bamboozling Anand in tactical assaults in the past, but it didn't work today. Vishy handled everything the Armenian could throw at his king and after a few mutual inaccuracies, collected his second full point from him. Aronian had a last chance to keep things going when Anand blundered with 33.Kf1 instead of the 33.g4. Black had the cool 33..Qxh5 and either a very unbalanced 2R vs Q comes up or the wild fight continues. Carlsen tried desperately to get a win for pride against Anand's Berlin in the final round but only managed to collect his third bagel for the day. In contrast, Aronian did manage to get a little back in the last round against Kramnik. Aronian was at his active best, temporarily giving up a central pawn for development and pulling a pretty king walk across the board in the four-rook endgame. Nice. The win also allowed Aronian to pull even with Kramnik in the standing, leaving both on an even 3/6 score.

Speaking of rapid brilliancies, I missed Bacrot's cavalcade of sacs against Filippov in the tiebreaks yesterday. White's position was already pretty dubious, but Bacrot toss at least three pieces during fireworks that lasted 15 moves, starting with 22..Rxe2. Great fun, unless you're Filippov.

I rather forgot this was starting so soon, my bad. Six rounds of double round-robin rapid in Moscow to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mikhail Botvinnik. Anand, Carlsen, Kramnik, Aronian! The first day hardly lived up to the quality of that list of names, it must be said. Blunders abounded, with Carlsen missing wins against Anand (probably) and Aronian (surely). Nice to see Kramnik continuing his new habit of sacrificing pieces, this time against Carlsen, though it ended in draw. I thought Kramnik was headed for a typically Kramnikian win over Aronian with a tempoing bishop in the endgame, but it ended in a draw quickly. Isn't 47.Bf1 headed for zugzwang rather quickly? 47.Kd7 48.Bh3+ Ke7 e4 and the knight has to move and the b-pawn looks tough to stop. (Damn computer isn't as impressed, however, so maybe we'll have to trust this Kramnik guy.) The world champion was the only one to score a victory, a nice piece of work against Aronian. The second half of the event is Saturday. It's a weird event in that the games are paused so the players can give commentary to the crowd. I'm pretty sure Botvinnik wouldn't have approved! But what the hey, he didn't much approve of the dissolution of the USSR either, so he wasn't exactly infallible.

Fun to have the four top-rated players on the new FIDE list facing off. A pity it isn't at least four rounds. All the players except Kramnik will join Ivanchuk, Nakamura, and Vallejo in the Grand Slam Masters Final starting on the 26th.

And then you're eliminated. I'm writing this as I fire up an appropriately atrocious and bombastic cinematic accompaniment, The Expendables. (What's up with Jet Li slumming with this crowd?) Every third day in Khanty-Mansiysk, with metronomic reliability, the field is chopped in half. The only real interest in these KOs before the quarterfinals start pairing top players and deciding world championship candidates spots are the upsets. Nerves fray, time controls accelerate, and a single slip sends you packing. It makes for enjoyable theater, though using these chaotic messes for world championships was always ridiculous. Using one to determine a few candidates isn't nearly as bad, though it's harsh that there is no second chance other than rating. The Grand Prix was that alternative, but apart from some bright chess, it was an organizational and commercial failure with cancelled and relocated events.

The fact that the winners of these KO events are almost always among the top seeds mitigates many strikes against them. Swiss, round-robin, KO, rapid, or blitz, the highest rated players rise to the top, and we got a vivid demonstration of that today. We should distinguish between real upsets and the technical ones between closely matched players. Current standings aside, Polgar beating Movsesian is hardly an upset when she's been rated higher than him for most of the past fifteen years. But stalwarts like Adams and Shirov going out indicates a little more, perhaps, that age can't be ignored forever and that their low seeding were not undeserved. Former top tenners will always have the potential to surprise, of course, no matter how far down the list they fall. Generally though, Elo rules. The last two World Cup winners, Kamsky and Gelfand, were veterans. Gelfand was the oldest contender in the field and also the top seed. (Local invitee Obodchuk was in his 50s and was eliminated by... Gelfand in the first round.)

Calling Bruzon's defeat of Vallejo-Pons, Bu's of Vachier-Lagrave or Parligras taking out Almasi upsets abuses the term a bit. These were all close matches that were virtual toss-ups when things moved to rapids. Of the Frenchman we've been expecting more for the past year or two, but he's on a steady plateau and young enough to still have a big move into the top 10 in him. I'd never heard of Mircea Parligras of Romania before, and he must have done something right to move up to a career rating high after 30 and now to take out the steady Almasi without tiebreaks.

For the most part though, to get back to the title brought into chess vogue by Jen Shahade, the higher-rated players made math look fun. Old chess culture beat new chess culture in the only matches to go to a second set of speed games. Svidler took out Nguyen and Ponomariov finally beat Ni Hua in a very strange match. The Chinese had a winning theoretical R vs B endgame with rook pawns in their second rapid game but couldn't put it away, allowing a 114-move draw. As far as I remember my Keres, the only way for the stronger side to win these positions is to keep the enemy king on the same side of the board as the pawn so you can use fork threats. Maybe tablebases know better these days. The brain melts in these matches playing on increment. This, to me, is the other big strike against KOs. The chess tends to be horrible. Then in the next game Ponomariov loaded up for a cliche Bxh7+ sac against Ni Hua's French only not to play it when the opportunity arose. He won anyway in 25 moves when Black blundered and then held the second game only when Ni Hua missed a winning shot. 37.Rf4! is an unusual tactical them, an attraction tactic that wins a piece or the exchange with an easy win. Very hard to see that the knight can suddenly be a dominating octopus. The French again showed its dark, masochistic side in the Svidler match win over Nguyen.

We shouldn't ignore the top guys who went through relatively smoothly. The upset hero of the last World Cup, teen Wesley So of the Philippines, couldn't hang with the confident top seed Karjakin in rapids. Pretty finishing move there. Ivanchuk's redoubtable technique ground down Alekseev, who was a tough second-round pairing. Morozevich, who does things with the French that would make Baudelaire blush, sweated little against Fier. Grischuk went to tiebreaks against Feller but had no trouble there. Nice to see the back of Feller, whose infamous cheating exploits at the Olympiad must be on the mind of every opponent he faces. Kamsky outplayed Kasimdzhanov in good style in another tough pairing. Avoiding rapids against the wily Uzbekistani was a worthwhile achievement. Taking a pass with white in the first game hoping for rapids can pay off, but Kamsky didn't return the favor. The inconsistent Le Quang Liem showed his power side, taking a novel opening approach into a superior endgame and grinding down Grachev, who is no slouch. Playing ..Bf5 before the usual ..Nb4 keeps the white queen off b1 and a quick e4 is dubious for White in most of these lines, with ..Bg4 and the usual Grunfeld pressure on the expanded center. That said, Black was doing okay in the deep main line too from what I can tell.

Kasparov complimented Radjabov's handling of Negi in their first game. It's refreshing to see Radjabov playing with such brio with white. The Indian seemed to be putting up decent resistance to White's knights and a-file invasion in their first game but eventually the pressure was too much and he threw the game away in one atrocious move. Negi's countryman Harikrishna tried an interesting piece sac against Jakovenko, but the Russian showed calm and class defusing the tactics reaching a pawn-up endgame. Vitiugov and Korobov dueled in the ever-crazy Semi-Slav Anti-Moscow and Korobov's prep came up badly lacking. They followed Anand-Shirov from this year's Leon event, which also came out well for White. European champ Potkin (not the mouth-harp luthier) was very impressive in beating Shirov in a slashing game with white. Wojtaszek missed a chance to win with black in his first game with Jobava. 27..Nxf1 wins, as both 28.Nxe8 and 28.Nxh5 lose to 28..Rc1! 29.Nxf6+ Qxf6! 30.Qxf6 Nd2+ 31.Kf2 Ne4+ gets the queen back. Instead the Polish #1 lost with white in the second game with the Georgian. Two rooks are usually more than a match for a queen, but not when the lady is accompanied by two knights and your king is open.

The heavyweights are circling as the round of 32 begins. Those who have avoided tiebreaks start to see some benefits from their extra rest days. Grischuk-Morozevich is the unfortunately early meeting between two of the favorites. Asian fans are hardly a bloc, but seeing two of their small remaining number meeting is a bit of a shame. The last Indian player, Gupta, faces the last of the original nine Chinese players, Bu Xiangzhi. 10 of the 32 are Russian and only four of them face off. The Big Three from Azerbaijan are all still going strong as well. Zherebukh of Ukraine, who just turned 18, is the youngest player left in the field. His countryman Ivanchuk is the oldest at 42. Note that the top three finishers make it to the candidates, not just the winner.

The FIDE World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk has lightened its field to 64. 62 unlucky losers went all the way to Siberia for a few hours of chess and are now headed home. Except for a few of the local wildcards, who are already home. (Not 64, since Akopian and Wang Hao never made the trip.) The top favorites went through without much drama. The biggest upset on the Elo chart was young American Sam Shankland taking out Peter Leko, who had fallen far from his decade in or near the top 10 before taking a lot of time off. After two bad results at Dortmund and the Olympiad the former world championship challenger hadn't played in nearly a year before he popped up for Hungary at the World Teams last month, where he turned in a creditable +2 result. He predictably dominated his game with white against Shankland, who was as surprised as anyone that his tough defense turned into a win when Leko's nerves fell apart. It happens, but Leko has only himself to blame for playing the Benoni to try to win the second game. There's no good way to play for a win with black against a strong opponent, but playing an opening that's so much against his style was too desperate by half. Black was practically busted by move 22 and Shankland was happy to cede the draw a few moves later instead of playing on for the full point.

Most of the top seeds went through without too much fanfare. Kamsky had his hands full with the unheralded Brazilian IM di Berardino, who came second in his national championship. Kamsky crushed him with ease in the first game with white, but the Brazilian showed considerable moxie to come back and beat his 260-point superior to force tiebreaks. Kamsky got nothing with white but went to work on di Berardino's IQP in the second game and then won with a little tactic. With Fier taking out Wang Yue, it was and admirable performance from the new Brazilian generation. While we're in the region, Felgaer of Argentina flirted with infamy for a moment in tiebreaks against 2009 World Cup surprise Malakhov. The Argentine had rook, knight, and an a-pawn versus Black's rook and the only danger in the position was stalemate. Which, after tangoing by several mates in six and seven in increment time, is exactly what Felgaer managed to do. But fate took pity on him and in the second game Malakhov, already under pressure, dropped his queen in just 25 moves.

It was a near wipeout for the Chinese, who came in with nine players, more than anyone other than Russia, and are already down to two. (Unless, as the Ugra live games page has it today, Bu Xiangzhi is now playing for Russia.) Sebastian "Finger" Feller is still with us, unfortunately, after beating Iordachescu in the tiebreaks. No word on whether or not his cheating co-conspirators are also in Khanty-Mansiysk. Or maybe FIDE has hired them.

Things heat up now, with no match a sure thing. We are guaranteed a few underdogs in the third rounds since a a few upset winners are meeting. Gupta beat Mamedov and now meets Shankland. The Ukrainian teenager Zherebukh beat his countryman Eljanov in tiebreaks and faces Felgaer. But attention will be on the top boards, where some tasty matchups like Karjakin-So and Alekseev-Ivanchuk are just about to bet underway. Two former KO winners, Kasimdzhanov and Kamsky meet.

Hurricane Irene won't hit New York until Sunday afternoon but I figured I should get this thread up now just in case. I'm on the highest ground in Brooklyn so I'm not terribly worried, though a power outage would be annoying. Two days trapped inside with kids aged one and three is scarier than a hurricane, so I hope it passes quickly.

Round one kicks off on Sunday in the ever-yaktastic Khanty-Mansiysk. Play starts at 5am NY time, which is when the aforementioned one-year-old wakes up anyway, so there's that. 128 players in the field, cut in half every three days. Both finalists and the third place finisher get spots in the next candidates event. Many of the world's top players are there, but I reiterate that I'm a little surprised at how many top-tenners are giving it a miss. Either they believe something we don't know about the road to the world championship or the cycle and title are more thoroughly debased than I thought. To clarify, with the caveat that such clarifications are often rendered meaningless by the ever-shifting sands of Kirsan's FIDE misrule, there are eight candidate spots. Three from this KO event, the loser of the Anand-Gelfand match, three rating spots (avg. of July 11 and Jan 12 lists, though I could see these changing), and, ridiculously, a wildcard.

All this is to say that with Carlsen, Kramnik, Aronian, Nakamura, and Topalov not playing in the KO, only four of them can get in by rating and the wildcard. I'm sure they all have different reasons for not playing, but it seems notable that at least one will be missing. The top seeds in Khanty-Mansiysk are Karjakin, Mamedyarov, Ivanchuk, and Ponomariov. Karjakin was a semifinalist at the last KO in 2009 and Ponomariov was a finalist; both were beaten by Gelfand. Other top contenders are Svidler, Grischuk, Radjabov, Gashimov, and former KO winner Kamsky. There are usually at least two "outsiders" in the quarters in these things. Last time Malakhov and Jakovenko were there, although since both were top 20 it's hard to call them outsiders. ("Very strong Russians who don't get invites" maybe.) Then there are veterans who have dropped down the rating list, like Leko, Morozevich, Adams, Polgar, and Shirov and energetic youngsters like Caruana, So, and Nepomniachtchi.

But the KO system is ruthless and a look at the brackets shows quickly that only a few of your favorites have a real chance at a deep run, which I define as making it to the quarters. As designed, the middle brackets are tough, with, for example, Svidler and Kamsky in the same group fighting for a spot in the quarters. Meanwhile, top seed Karjakin can't hit anyone before the final eight higher rated than Dominguez at #16. Having crowd faves Grischuk, Shirov, and Moro in the same eighth is a little tragic. And Vitiugov is there with them and he's been playing incredibly solidly for months.

So, upset picks for the first round? How high will you go? An upset on the top 20 boards is exceedingly rare since they went to 1 vs 128 pairings. Still, there are a few inconsistent types up there this time. Navara and Wang Hao have shown the capacity for very bad days, but a few hundred points is a lot to make up, especially since it takes two games to do the trick. Anand and Leko have both lost on the very first day only to come back the next and destroy their opponents and win the rapids. (Touzane! Kobese! Both in Moscow, 2001. The post-game picture I took of the delirious Touzane with Tkachiev is a treasure.) And of course the ever-upsettable Ivanchuk is an exception. He's lost his first match several times and also made it to the final.

I tried to get Jan Gustafsson to go out on a limb with some picks but, jetlagged from his return from a brutal Goichberg event in NYC he said he barely knew who was playing. (He missed qualification himself by two places.) We agreed that Giri's absence and Feller's presence say a great deal about the state of the chess world and the federations that seem to do little more than stagger from blunder to blunder. Let's hope the games in Khanty-Mansiysk pass without incident.

At least I'm sure to get the first day in before the hurricane hits. As long as our food supply and Dora episodes hold out we'll be all right.

For anyone rushing out to copyright that moniker in order to sell commemorative mugs, mouse pads, and teddy bears with Peter Svidler's face on them, any American chess fan can tell you that the title is already taken. Walter Browne won six US titles from 1974-83, even more impressive than it looks since that span included only seven events. Peter Svidler just won his amazing sixth Russian title, his first since 2008 and 17 years since his first in 1994. Since Russia went solo in 1992, only one other player has won more than once, Morozevich in 1998 and 2007. In 2004 the championship was supercharged into a superfinal, a round-robin that mixed qualifiers with the heavyweights who often chickened out of the big opens.

The 2011 edition was perhaps the strongest yet, if also the smallest. All of Russia's top stars were there, plus qualifiers Timofeev and Galkin. Kramnik turned up for just the second time, joined by Grischuk, Morozevich, Svidler, Nepomniachtchi, and new Russian number one Sergey Karjakin. No insult to Jakovenko or Vitiugov, who are currently rated higher than Moro and Nepo, but there's no doubt the latter two are the marquee names. The sporadically retired Morozevich actually dropped below 2700 on the last list and is ready to add over 40 points on the next one after his results in the Russian Ch and Biel. Great to have him back.

So a short sprint it would be, just seven rounds with one rest day. +2 was looking good for a share of first in such a tough field. But instead of conservative play we got a real firefight with under 50% of games drawn. No one escaped without a loss, though Timofeev and Galkin were knocked around as Elo expected, both going winless. Svidler started fast out of the gate, beating Kramnik in the first round when Big Vlad couldn't keep the fires burning after an enterprising piece sac. Then after two draws Svidler won three games in a row to lock up the title. The final table looks closer than it was due to Svidler's loss to Morozevich in the final round. Clinching the Russian championship with a round to spare is no small feat, especially in an event of just seven rounds. Svidler played a lot of excellent defense, twice winning with counterattacks. When he got the chance to go on the offensive he was just as impressive, outplaying Galkin and Nepomniachtchi with powerful efforts. It was a particularly sweet win for him since it came right on the heels of his mediocre showing for Russia at the World Teams.

Kramnik continues to impress with his aggressive play, not to say devil-may-care. After losing the Anand match Kramnik started sacrificing pawns in the opening on a regular basis and now he's chucking pieces around like a Spaniard heaving tomatoes during the Tomatina. Of course such risks don't always pay off, although Kramnik's other loss came in his beloved Berlin, to Karjakin, who just beat Kramnik's Petroff a few months ago. Kramnik compensated with three wins to tie for 3-5th with Karjakin and Grischuk. He also pulled off his "I want to win with black so I will play the Pirc and you will think you can beat me but you will lose because I am Kramnik and you are not" trick against Galkin in the final round. He first did this against Smeets at Wijk aan Zee last year, though it didn't work out against Naiditsch at Dortmund 2010, when the lower-rated player did beat him. There were many other wonderful games in Moscow, a real Russian feast.

Next up, the FIDE World Cup in, where else, Khanty-Mansiysk. Round one is on Sunday the 28th. As I mentioned here before, the number of top players not participating guarantees that at least one or two top-tenners won't be in the next world championship cycle, assuming FIDE actually sticks to its own rules. Nakamura qualified by rating but just tweeted he's off to Vancouver for two weeks. I hope he's preparing for the Bilbao Grand Slam Final, which is at the end of September. Aronian, Carlsen, Topalov, and Kramnik are also absent. I'll start a separate thread for this one tomorrow, have to get our upset picks in! (Leko-Shankland, hmmm...)

[Apologies to John Lennon.] Can I tell you how much I'm not looking forward to doing a new install and moving all the content over? MySQL or not, it's going to be a nightmare. This is what I see every time I log in here:

"You've written 2,112 entries with 94,334 comments."

Only a few hundred of those comments are from the recent spam deluge, when Movable Type's filters finally lost the battle against the bots. Looks like Disqus or Captcha's are in our future, my friends, or some other form of login for comments. A little annoying, and we'll also be missing out on all these great offers for knockoff Nike shoes and whatever else the spambots are hawking these days. Plus, add a few thousand to that number because there was a crash around 4 years ago and I had to add back the comments from the html pages, pasting them into the bodies of a few month's worth of articles. So the database doesn't count them.

Starting over should include various new features as well. There are lots of cool things out there these days. Up and down user votes for comments so top picks can appear under the post on the homepage, for example. I'd also like to finally get some other bloggers in here to liven up the joint. For features, as opposed to my haphazard ramblings. Things like Q&A sessions, rating commentary, listicles, link roundups from other chess sites, etc. I'm sure we could put together a list of interesting questions for the Q&A. My original hope for this site was to crowdsource half of the content, but getting that sort of thing rolling takes time I haven't had in a long time.

Small children do tend to take up a lot of time, I've found. They are now three and fifteen months old. But for the past 18 months it's not been them as much as what my wife calls our third child, The Manuscript. (Also known around the house as "The Fucking Manuscript.") This is the book I've been writing for the author trio of Garry Kasparov, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel on the financial crisis and the technological stagnation of the US and global economy. It started out as a manifesto on innovation and our publisher, WW Norton, convinced us to be more ambitious and to expand the scope to history, economics, politics, and social factors. It's been a huge amount of research and work, plus wrangling three very smart, very busy people for input. Kasparov has politics internationally and in Russia, plus speeches, articles, and various other things. Levchin is into vc and tech investing of all sorts (Yelp!, for example) and for a day job he recently became a VP at Google after they bought his company, Slide. Thiel wears even more hats, from investing early in Facebook to running a hedge fund and being active in libertarian politics. Both speak at conferences around the world on what seems like a constant basis. (Sadly, I never got to rendezvous at Aspen or Davos.) Levchin and Thiel were both PayPal founders.

But the FM now has a real name, The Blueprint and a real cover. Pre-order now. International rights have already been sold in seven or eight languages. It is now in the hands of the copyeditors and when it comes back there will only be some charts and a few other graphics to add, plus a few updates on the topical items (debt ceiling showdown, a few others). There will still be book-related things like putting together magazine articles and excerpts, but for the most part my weekly existence just gained around 80 hours of time compared to the last year. Whew.

Since this entire post is so meta, I'll won't bother inserting any token chess tidbits. I'll just post a new one. I'll get to work on the new install this weekend as soon as I figure out what it is I'm going to be installing.

Thanks for all the inquiries about my health. I'm fine. The post-Bazna lull led into my vacation trip, which has largely turned into a non-vacation since the ^&@#!*% book still isn't finished. It's going to be amazing if they still let us publish it so late...

I'm barely able to check the results of the World Teams and Biel, let alone look at the games or put up a post. Plus, the Movable Type software the Dirt runs on is pretty much obsolete now, it seems, so when the manuscript is done and I'm back I'll be redoing the entire back-end. I'll also be bringing in a few guest bloggers to class the joint up a little. (A little, wouldn't want to overdo it.) Do don't delete your bookmarks just yet. I'll try to tweet every few days and should be blogging again before the end of Dortmund. Consider this an open thread if anyone is still out there.

Plus, there's Biel, World Teams, and Dortmund all underway. And the World Cup pairings were just published. No Carlsen, no Aronian, no Kramnik, no Nakamura, no Topalov. Three (?!) players from the World Cup go to the 2012 candidates. One wildcard, plus Gelfand. (Sorry, Boris!) Then there are, idiotically, three who go in on rating average. (This infuriates me even more than wildcard. One of the things that made the WCh cycle special was that you had to PLAY for it and perform under that unique pressure.) This means that even if one of those five aforementioned heavyweights gets the wildcard, one of them is guaranteed to be out of the next WCh cycle. I know, it's hardly a serious cycle and Carlsen boycotted the last candidates anyway, but still. As a fan I'm always more "why not play" than "why play," and without a credible alternative at the moment it seems like it's worth showing up.

Oh those Germans. They can't let the French one-up them on anything, not even chess cheating. At the German championship last week, 23-year-old FM Christoph Natsidis of Bannewitz, who will now be quasi-famous for this one thing for the rest of his life thanks to Google and his own stupidity, decided it would be a good idea to check his position on his smartphone a few times in the toilet. ChessVibes has the story. (Repeated toilet trips, suspicious opponent.) Natsidis confessed and apologized when confronted, so I'm not sure we can even say he was caught. Had he stonewalled and refused to let the arbiter see his phone they probably would have had to disqualify him without further proof. I don't think anything has come out about Natsidis's other games -- he was on track for an IM norm and would have scored it even had he lost that final game.

But much the way refusing a breathalyzer test allows the state to do all sorts of things to you, the "consciousness of guilt evidence" (that is the term, as oxymoronic as it sounds) of his refusal to let them see his phone would have been strong, even if he could have denied guilt till death. I don't know if the German Ch actually has rules saying the arbiter has certain search powers that cannot be refused under penalty of disqualification, but apparently something like that is required. It will be interesting to see what the German federation will do. FIDE?!

I don't remember which of my chess tweeps said, regarding the event, that only top events can afford security. But while it would hardly be foolproof, you can get a hand-held security wand that will pick up a cell phone for less than a hundred bucks. Probably still not practical for big opens, but what would be? Lockers for checking phones are yet another expense and potential can of worms. The only thing you can do is give arbiters clear guidelines, limited powers, and make the penalties severe enough to create a deterrent. Stripping a player of his membership for a lengthy time first offense would be a good start. Second offense, chopping off a hand?