Watching the Candidates Matches

As I am watching the World Championship Candidates matches, I am surprised to see that Vladimir Kramnik is out, despite his absolutely amazing opening preparation. In several games against Radjabov and Grischuk he seemed to have barely made any moves of his own and yet he had a very hard time against Teimur, and even a harder time against Grischuk. I suppose that proves that chess a sport still lives! Knowing most openings “down to checkmate” does not guarantee success, even when accompanied by such a skill of middlegame and endgame that Kramnik has. It does however make the games a bit harder to follow as it is very hard to tell where the game actually begins.

Alexander Grischuk is through to the finals!

Bishop Sacrifice in Panov Attack (Caro-Kann)

One of the main points of playing blitz on the internet is to go over finished games, and draw certain conclusions from them. I learned a fair bit from the game I played online today – something that can be useful in tournament games I play later, because the pawn structure and combination ideas are typical for the opening that I play.
This position occurred in this game
White to move
Black just played 11… Nde7, instead of the more standard 11… Nce7. I continued with 12. Be3 and got a position with isolated Queen’s Pawn (IQP) that I like, but putting the bishop on e3 did feel a bit passive.
After the game, I looked up this position in Karpov and Podgaets’ book on the Panov attack since the move Black played took me a bit by surprise. Turns out White has a nice way to exploit the fact that Black reduced his control over g5 square, and play 12.Bg5!? The key point is that if 12…Bxg5, then White can strike with a typical sacrifice on h7 with 13. Bxh7+!?:
White does not win on a spot, but the book shows that his position is better. This is the kind of guidance I would expect from an opening book, so I recommend it for its thoroughness! I took a longer way around, but in the end did create pressure against Black king and won (who said that analysing blitz games is a waste of time?!)
Replay the game in the viewer:

Opening preparation - therapeutic?

A couple of years ago I was playing in an annual BC-Washington chess match. My game has gone into a long and tiring endgame, but as I was walking around, waiting for my opponent to move, I overheard US master Marcel Milat analyzing his game against Alfred Pechisker. Marcel won as Black, after gaining a nice position out of the opening. He uttered one phrase that stuck to my mind: "I find studying theory to be therapeutic." I thought to myself. "Holy Crap, how does he do that, why do I always have a hard time learning opening theory, deciding on which line to pick for my repertoire, and even worse - during the game desperately trying to remember which move to play on move 10, while my master opponent is walking around, wondering what the heck I am thinking about."

The word "therapeutic" however stuck to my mind; I was wondering how to be like Marcel and calmly study opening theory, the same way I analyze my games and endgames (which I actually do find relaxing and pleasant). Marcel was well-known for great opening preparation when he lived in BC, so I realized that proper attitude is key to success. Several problems seem to have plagued my opening preparation in the last few years (aggravated by rarely playing in regular chess tournaments):
1) Getting tired of old openings after a disappointing game put doubt on a certain line (a crushing quick defeat or unpleasant pawn structure that drags on until endgame)
2) As a solution - trying to switch to new openings, but not having enough practice to learn them, having similar problems (or even worse) in the new openings. This is a known syndrome (giving up on old lines too easily), that leads to 'jumping', but it is sometimes hard to distinguish from just wanting to learn new middlegame structures.
3) In openings that I rarely encountered -  not even having any line prepared at all ("so what do I play here on move 7")
Somewhere around summer of this year, I realized that I if I want to take my chess openings a bit more seriously, I need to change my approach, which now consists of several points:
1) To NOT study new openings in replacement of what I already have.
2) To review and organize (in a database) all the lines that I have ever played - making my repertoire more formalized and concrete, so that over the board I don't have to decide between 3 lines that I have played before. Part of my problem was that I forgot the stuff I actually did kind of know 5-10 years ago, so it was definitely useful to review those old lines. Another source of frustration was having database files scattered all over my hard drive, in different database formats (some in Chessbase, some in Chess Assistant), making it really hard to figure out where to add new lines, or update existing ones. That had to be fixed for sure. Somewhere (in a database, on paper, etc) - there must be a tree of moves that constitute my response to every possible move, in a style to similar to Nunn's Chess Openings.
3) Fill the gaps I have in my repertoire (identify them first, and gradually - prepare some lines in response to openings I never played...)
4) To plan my other study (practice games on ICC or book reading, etc) around that formalized repertoire.
Thinking about it again - with a more conservative approach, I see how studying openings can be "therapeutic", since I would have a goal that I can gradually move forward to - a manageable opening repertoire that fits into my memory, but also fits my style. As Alex Yermolinsky said in "The Road to Chess Improvement", "Man gotta know his limitations", and definitely with playing 10 tournament games a year, it's hard to master King's Indian, Sveshnikov Sicilian, and Marshall attack from scratch all at once, so you have to make some choices; or else the number of possibilities one has to remember on every move can easily get out of control ...

Chess Opening Explorer (web 2.0)

In my previous post I described the issues with different file formats for storing chess games for viewing on a local PC. The need to constantly refresh references databases by downloading weekly game updates, copying and pasting annotations between databases to keep notes up to date, re-building opening trees, etc only add more to the challenges of organizing one's game collections. Maybe web 2.0 is the answer to all those issues? chessgames.com has become sort a youtube of chess games. Their latest feature - opening explorer is also quite neat! Some lines require paid subscription to be able to see beyond move 3, but this line of Sveshnikov that I am interested in is available up to move move 15. Quite a teaser; just enough to get me interested in their services.

Another interesting feature is collections of games - sort of like playlists in youtube - lists of games selected by users. For example - here is a collection of games from one of Kasparov's volumes. Paid members can download entire collections in pgn. I like where this is going! Having discovered RSS only last year, I can't help thinking that next step would be for websites like TWIC to provide game updates in rss feeds. That way anyone who wants to get all games played in the last few months can conveniently get their updates via an RSS client, instead of having to manually click and download on a hundred zip files on their page.