With nobody making much a move near the top, Aronian's +2 is good enough for first place after eight rounds of the Nalchik Grand Prix with five rounds still to play. Five players are tied for 2-6 on +1, giving flashbacks to the massive tie in the last round of Corus. Most of the action has been the early duds coming back and a few early success falling apart. In the latter category, Gata Kamsky has lost three of his last four. In the 7th he was a move away from a wild win over Karjakin but blundered and lost. In the 8th he ran into Eljanov, his bête noire. I think this is the fifth time the Ukrainian has beaten Kamsky in five tries over the past year and a half. Bizarre.
Kamsky still hasn't reached Ivanchuk at the bottom of the crosstable. The great Vassily is en route to dropping another massive pile of rating points. After plunging on the last list he might do it again in July unless he rights the ship. Bacrot is the drawing master of the event with eight in a row of varying degrees of dullness and inferiority. Svidler moved back to +1 with a nice Grunfeld win over Eljanov in the 6th. The next day he made 22 moves against Kasimjanov's Petroff Defense. When teased about his theoretical efforts not keeping Petroff players up at night he replied that in fact, his game was a fine demonstration of positional sacrifice to equalize with the white pieces... But overall it should be said that there have been a great number of very interesting and hard-fought games so far in Nalchik.
The official website has a nice little item with comments from a few of the players on seconds and seconding. Not listed, Peter Leko is there with German GM Jan Gustafsson, who has been seconding regularly lately. Having a sort of professional pal with you to keep you focused must be a good thing, even if, as Akopian says, having someone you can trust around you is more important than the chess work.
Bacrot just won against Mamedyarov - not sure if he had been inferior at some stage during the game which, in any case, wasn't dull ... .
I liked that game also.
Bacrot made many draws , but most of them were hard fought as confirms S.Shipov in his analysis , besides it takes two people to make a draw .
Bacrot never take many risks like many other players , he's a grinder , positional player , it was an interesting game against Shak . i think he won a tourney in Moscow recently
Kamsky has a good grip in the position at the moment, seems like he has decent chance for victory today , would be good cause he has been unlucky lately
Kamsky is no. 25 right now according to live ratings list, IMO this very precisely reflects his playing strength
In any case, if players were paid _per move_, Kamsky would be rich by now.
This reminds me of an anecdote, unfortunately I don't remember the details ... . I think an Icelandic player had numerous marathon games during a European summer tournament (Biel?) - people were joking he liked being on the stage that much because it was the coolest place around ['cool' her of course refers to temperature].
Grischuk v. Kamsky was a great fighting game. I guess G's sac wasn't sound, but he almost made it work; Grischuk showed a lot of courage to even try and Kamsky showed a lot of grit to hang in there under the pressure. Kudos to both of them for a real battle.