The inaugural ACP world cup rapid has just concluded. Peter Leko is the winner, as predicted by, or at least hoped for by, acirce in the comments. The patient Hungarian beat Ivanchuk, who had the look of the favorite about him up to the final match. The first game was drawn (Alekhine's Defense from Chukky!) and the second game was also drawn to move the final match into blitz. After a draw, Leko beat the Alekhine's in the second game to take the title and the $40K first prize. Congratulations to Leko and to the ACP and its president, Pavel Tregubov, and to everyone who worked hard to bring this event about. Especially those on the ground in Odessa.
The semifinals were both exciting stuff, if for different reasons. Ivanchuk and Radjabov played a remarkably accurate and interesting minor piece endgame won by Ivanchuk to take the lead. He then held, and won, the second game to move into the final. After that fire vs fire battle, the ice vs ice of Leko-Gelfand was relatively tranquil on the board, and they drew the first two and went to blitz. After two white wins Leko had black in the armageddon game and won through.
Hikaru Nakamura and Pentala Harikrisha, both eliminated in the first round, seem to be looking in the wrong direction. Following the live semifinal games, no doubt. [Pic from Golubev. Click for larger version.]
Offtopic
Mig, can you create a thread on the allegations of computer-assisted cheating in the Indian Championship? thanks.
http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3595
Offtopic
Mig, can you create a post on the cheating allegations in the Indian Championships? thanks
http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=3595
Mig,
Bang on comment, wrong direction indeed! Ah, indeed, youth is wated on the young. Just who are these women? Four of them, yet... Purely chessic interest, of course.
Sorry...should be "wasted"
And you just know a few of them are looking to come to the USA. http://www.google.com/search?q=ukrainian+wife
C'mon Hikaru, she could teach you Russian (or even Ukrainian), and all the secrets of the Soviet school would be yours. And you'd have a lot more people to talk to at tournaments.
Mig.. you joke, but it happens...
Mainstream chess rules have changed since M.Botvinnik's time.
[1] The Rapid (20 minute) time control has become commonplace.
I cannot see the big picture well enuf to judge:
*** Does a 2600+ grandmaster now play as many Rapid tournaments or games each year as he does with normal time control? Or what is the approx RATIO?
[2] Forms of draw-odds chess are being adopted at a, well, rapid pace.
Armageddon was part of the tie-break rules for Kramnik-Topalov 2006/10. This ACP tournament is not the only other instance for Armageddon I have read about since K-T.
Clint Ballard's BAP tournament was a success in late 2006 in Bellevue WA USA.
Thanks.
Two brief comments.
First, the "after" in the penultimate sentence of the final paragraph must be used in a non-chronological sense, by contrast with its uses elsewhere in the report. The Ivanchuk - Radjabov match was the second semi.
Second, the picture captions reminds me of Tkachiev. Have a guess why.
OMG, this girl so sexy phup !
Gene M:
I can't think of very many big rapid tournaments off the top of my head, and I can think of many big classical tournaments, so I think that most top players mostly play classical class.
Looking at only resonably significant events, last year the top 15 rapid players (according to Stefan Fischl: http://members.aon.at/sfischl/stat.html) played an average of 23 games, and the top 15 classical players played an average of 63 games. That suggests something like a 3:1 ratio, but only two players played more than 40 rapid games (Kasimdzhanov and Anand), and almost everyone outside the top ten there played fewer than 20 games. Meanwhile, everyone except two (Kramnik and Anand) in the classical top 25 played at least that many. And even then, both of them only played about half the year, and a ton of players played a lot more than that (Ivanchuk played 119 classical games). Anand was the only player I could find that had more rapid games than classical games.
If I had to put up a number, I'd probably put it around 5:1 for a player above 2700, and maybe 10:1 for everyone else above 2600.
Great info Daniel, thanks.
I will guess that during the next ten years, the ratio of long-to-rapid will move in the direction of 1:1. Perhaps the ratio will decrease from the current average of 8:1 down to 6:1 or 5:1.
I dare say the current 8:1 ratio is much closer to 1:1 than the ratio was ten years ago. My guess is the trend will continue.