The new generation at Corus

New generation at Corus
David R. Sands
January 19, 2008
Washington Times

Robert James Fischer (March 9, 1943-Jan. 18, 2008).

News of Bobby Fischer’s death in Iceland comes just at our deadline. We’ll have a full appreciation — of the player, not the man — in next week’s column.

The veterans stumbled right out of the gate and a younger generation of stars took advantage at the Corus Chess Festival, the annual trio of elite invitational tournaments being held at the Dutch seaside town of Wijk aan Zee.

In the elite Corus A tournament, a Category 20 event with an eye-popping average rating of 2742, world champion Viswanathan Anand of India and Bulgarian former champ Veselin Topalov both lost their first-round games, to Azerbaijani GM Teimour Radjabov and Armenia’s Levon Aronian, respectively.

While the top seeds faltered, Norwegian 16-year-old wunderkind Magnus Carlsen, Aronian and Radjabov — who doesn’t turn 21 until March — are setting the pace, all at 3½-1½ through Thursday’s play . Also very much in the mix is another former champ, Russian GM Vladimir Kramnik, tied for fourth with Hungary’s Judit Polgar at 3-2.

Carlsen, who finished dead last in 2007 in his first go-round in the Corus A event, started this year with two wins, including an impressive positional crush of Ukrainian GM Pavel Eljanov. The game is reminiscent of countless victories by former Soviet world champ Anatoly Karpov, in which the annotator can nod off for clumps of moves at a time as the winner logically, inexorably pursues a simple plan to victory.

Here is the full story.