Bologan leads with 4/5 after beating Harikrishna today in another sloppy game. The Indian #3 played an ill-advised exchange sac and couldn't back it up. The other decisive game was also very messy. Rublevsky seems to have recovered his game, which must have been lost with his luggage en route to Turin along with all his non-tacky shirts. Today he beat Volokitin thanks to his own speculative exchange sac and a poor spate of defense by the young Ukrainian. The Russian champion is in clear second a half point behind Bologan.
Grischuk-Mamedyarov should have been the third decisive game, though it's hard to say in whose favor. Grischuk was applying pressure and avoided a few draws only to lose his way during the attack. The Azerbaijani #2, who didn't play in Turin after some noisy problems with his federation, then missed several chances to collect the point, failing to find the narrow path to safety with his king. The counterintuitive 41..Kf7 would have done the job. In round 4, Ivanchuk continued this tournament's unofficial opposite-colored bishop theme and ground out a win over Mamedyarov with a nice king walk.
Comments
Karjakin at +0 =3 -2, that's quite a step down from the recent olympiad.
Bologan is on the roll, great showing by him.
Posted by: Martin at June 21, 2006 18:39
I'm beginning to think that Karjakin is the next generations Morozevich or Shirov; brilliant chess one tournament and nothing much the next. In my mind its that inconsistency that will keep him from becoming a world champion.
Posted by: chesstraveler at June 21, 2006 20:04
Or maybe it's not very reasonable to draw such conclusions from the results of a 16-year-old.
Posted by: acirce at June 21, 2006 20:26
Perhaps too much chess for most of these guys. I suspect the majority of them have been going none stop for several months now.
Posted by: pundit at June 21, 2006 22:49
Look at the early games of Karpov. Or even Tigran Petrosian. Relatively wild, attacking crushes. Then they learned how to be world champions.
Posted by: Julian Maltese at June 22, 2006 02:31
Misha Tal on the other hand didnt have to unlearn his attacking game to become WC!
Posted by: d at June 22, 2006 05:19
I guess Tigran Petrosian played one of wildest WC matches against Spassky in 69.
Posted by: Ando at June 22, 2006 05:30
Oops, I mean in 1966, when he actually won :)
Posted by: Ando at June 22, 2006 05:59
This is a very interesting tournament because to me it is a competition between 12 GMs each of whom could be expected to be a dark horse in a super GM tournament or to flounder completely, even in a lower-rated one. It is interesting to see which of them step up their game. My money is on Mamedyarov, Bologan, Grischuk and maybe Nisipeanu.
Posted by: Yuriy Kleyner at June 22, 2006 08:58
I've followed Liviu's career since Vegas '99; it's been amazingly regular in its inconsistency, if one would pardon the oxymoron.
Posted by: cynical at June 22, 2006 09:51
Ivanchuk has to be the favorite, he has twice the experience and half again the talent of the rest of the field (Grischuk and Karjakin aside in the latter case, perhaps). Of course, I'm surprised Ivanchuk can walk straight given how uneven he is...
Bologan is a weird one, all right. He and Shirov are the poster children for crosstables that look like:
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or
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Posted by: gmc at June 22, 2006 16:49
I wonder what the result of the Harikrishna - Mamedyarov game was . The round 6 result shows that Mamedyarov won whereas the crosstable shows Harikrishna won.
Posted by: peach at June 22, 2006 18:18
Harikrishna won, and quite beautifully.
Posted by: Mig at June 22, 2006 18:44
Hey, Mig:
What is the format of the US championship going to be ? Is it possible to publicize? The AF4C has drastically reduced the number of qualifiers.
Posted by: peach at June 22, 2006 19:42
Sort of. Various aspects of it are still up in the air. I've talked to Erik Anderson recently and he's talking with Goichberg. Hard to announce things piecemeal. I was supposed to get at least a little info to update the site this week, but nothing so far. I'll be doing an item about it one way or another this week to at least clarify what we don't know.
Posted by: Mig at June 23, 2006 01:30
