Fighting draws

Both games end in a draw
Posted on 11/10/2010 by Bilbao Final Masters

Today, day three, we have reached the midpoint of the Masters of Grand Slam Chess. Today both the shortest and longest matches until now in the tournament were played. Anand and Kramnik drew in barely an hour and 20 minutes, ensuring that they would both remain in the top two spots on the leaderboard. On the other board, Shirov and Carlsen fought long and hard in a 5 hour and 40 minute match, although the result in both instances was the same – a draw.

In the first match current world champion Viswanathan Anand went up against Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik. The match went along by way of a Catalan opening. Black was able to get some interesting activity for his minor pieces in exchange for an inferior pawn structure. Kramnik used this activity to exchange the majority of his available pieces and enter a final stage known for being an advantage to white. Nevertheless, Kramnik’s analysis was very profound and he showed that black could easily achieve a draw, as was the case. This result changes the state of the current theory about final stages and amounts to an important contribution on Kramnik’s part.

In the other match, Magnus Carlsen, current world number one, faced off with the black pieces against Alexei Shirov. Magnus chose to repeat the Breyer variation of the Ruy-Lopez opening, which Shirov used recently against Baramidze in February. In mid-game, Alexei forced an interesting tactical sequence where both sides exchanged blows left and right. Throughout this transition, no less than four different types of unbalanced exchanges of hardware were produced back and forth, from a rook for two lesser pieces, a rook for a lesser piece, two rooks for three lesser pieces and finally, a queen against three lesser pieces. In the end, Shirov’s queen was able to generate enough of an attack against Carlsen’s King to force him to accept a draw, since his three pieces were unable to hold her off, despite attempting to do so for more than 170 moves.

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