Battle of the ages
David R. Sands
Washington Times
October 13, 2007
It’s the kind of harmonic convergence that makes a chess columnist’s job easy.
The world’s best senior players crowned a new champion late last month in Austria, and the world’s best junior players are nearing the end of their title tournament this weekend in Armenia. Both events provided ample opportunity for enterprising play.
In Gmunden, Austria, Lithuanian IM Algimantas Butnorius was the surprise winner of FIDE’s 17th Senior World Championship with a 9-2 score, a half-point ahead of Russian GMs Evgeny Vasiukov and Yuri Shabanov and Czech GM Vlastimil Jansa. Scoring a respectable 7-4 was New Orleans chess legend FM Jude Acers, apparently fully recovered from his harrowing Hurricane Katrina ordeal.
Butnorius earned a key point in Austria against a former senior world champ, GM Janis Klovans of Latvia. After some lengthy maneuvering in a classic Closed Ruy Lopez battle, Butnorius as Black secures a positional clamp through a temporary pawn sacrifice.
Here is the full article.
Good for Jude. Hope he’ll be back to New Orleans soon.
First time I hear of Mr. Acers.
Sand, in this article says, if I understood right, that in the Spanish Defense, White never achieves much in the King side. I think this declaration is not accurate for there are some games that White does develop a King-side offense in the Ruy.
It may be that Sand refers only to the specific variation in the Ruy played in his analyzed game.
The vocal feature that the Washington post has where you can hear the article as well as read it is very new to me. I think it is great. Is it computer reading or a human?