SANDS: Rising stars light up Euro chess championship
By David R. Sands
The Washington Times
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Cue the chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset.”
In one more sign that kids grow up fast these days, 17-year-old prodigy GM Anish Giri had what for him rates as a novel experience: losing to a younger player. At the 13th European Individual Championship now under way in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the reigning Dutch national champ fell to 15-year-old fellow prodigy GM Ilya Nyzhnyk from Ukraine. Some are already billing the game, the first over-the-board clash of the two wunderkinds, as a sneak preview of the 2020 world championship match.
In an Open Catalan (with a slew of tricky transpositions), Nyzhnyk as White wins back his gambited pawn, but Caruana obtains a perfectly defensible position, with some good squares for his knights as White struggles to get his bishop pair free. But the sense of lurking danger that usually is so highly developed in grandmasters utterly fails Black here, as he badly underestimates the power of White’s h-pawn thrust.
Full article here.
Giri is a genius.