Category: World Chess News

Sergey Karjakin defied the odds to survive another 6.5 hours and 94 moves of torture at the hands of Magnus Carlsen, constructing a saving fortress just when it seemed the World Champion would finally take the lead in the match. It was a “mystifying” day, to use Peter Svidler’s word, as first Sergey and then Magnus committed a single glaring error each that transformed the course of the encounte.

When Sergey was asked how he was feeling after once more coming back from the dead he answered simply “fantastic!”, while Magnus, who was clearly feeling very far from fantastic, still found a positive to accentuate: “I really believe it’s better to be attacking than defending”.

So going into the second rest day Sergey Karjakin has increased his rating by four points by holding the World Champion and world no. 1 to four draws. Only eight games now remain before we head to tiebreaks.

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Magnus Carlsen, the three-time world chess champion, believes the fitter the body, the sharper the mind.

The Norway-born Mr. Carlsen, 25, has been playing chess since he was 8. At 13, he was one of the youngest people ever to be awarded the title of grandmaster, the highest level of chess mastery; in 2013, he won his first world championship. He is set to defend his world title at the World Chess Championship, playing a series of matches against challenger Sergey Karjakin in New York City through November 30.

Many parents will be sorry to learn that Mr. Carlsen keeps his mind focused by playing videogames. He gives his memory a workout by practicing chess blindfolded. At the Sohn Investment Conference in 2015, he defeated three challengers in simultaneous timed blindfold matches, to raise money for pediatric cancer research and treatment.

With regular matches at Mr. Carlsen’s level easily lasting five hours or more, and conceivably as long as three weeks at a stretch, physical stamina, as well as mental stamina, is needed. Mr. Carlsen says he believes a healthy diet and physical training are crucial for a chess master to remain at peak, just as they are for other types of athletes. “I get bored very easily, so I don’t do well in the gym,” Mr. Carlsen says. “Luckily for me, I have a real love of sport.”

While prodigies often set aside every other hobby to focus on one talent, Mr. Carlsen says he always made time for soccer. “No sport challenges your endurance like soccer, both mentally and physically,” he says. He still plays on a local recreational team in Norway called Lokomotiv Oslo.

In soccer games, as in chess matches, “games are lost or won in the final hours due to mistakes caused by fatigue,” says Mr. Carlsen, who is known as a chess player who makes very few errors while often causing opponents to do so.

When he is in his best physical shape, Mr. Carlsen says, he is able to sleep and relax between chess matches. He also practices yoga. He has three sisters who also practice yoga, and a yoga teacher is the head of his game-development company, Play Magnus. “I find that the routine of yoga helps me calm my mind so I can focus on strategies,” he says.

In 2013, Mr. Carlsen started training with Peter Heine Nielsen, a Lithuania-based chess coach. The two discuss mental and physical training routines by email and phone. “My goal is to get Magnus in the best mental and physical state possible leading up to big tournaments,” Mr. Nielson says. “Diet, rest and exercise are a big part of that. He also needs to have fun to keep the pressure off.”
The Workout

When Mr. Carlsen is on the road for a tournament, he depends on his workouts to help him relieve tension and relax. He might run intervals on the treadmill at a hotel gym, adjusting the incline and intensity for 30 to 60 minutes. “Running is a time where I can go through game strategies,” he says.

After he gets his heart rate up, he winds down with a series of stretches, or he will flow through yoga sequences for 20 minutes. “Much of my core work comes from yoga,” he says. “I’m not the type to go to the gym and run through reps and sets of exercise. I need something more fluid and fun.” If he can find a hot yoga studio, he’ll attend a class.

He says he likes the challenge and focus of yoga, but still prefers the competitiveness of soccer, basketball or tennis. If he has a rest day between matches, he sometimes gathers team members for a low-key pickup game of basketball or soccer. “Hard physical training, especially in a competitive setting, takes a lot of energy, so during tournaments we keep the training at a level light,” says Mr. Heine. “Never more than an hour or two of soccer or basketball.”

At home in Oslo, Mr. Carlsen goes to a 90-minute hot yoga class two to three times a week. He plays defense on his local soccer team but says he prefers to attack when playing casually with friends. He trains with his team one to two times a week for an hour and usually has one game a week. During Norway’s long winters, he goes cross-country skiing and hiking on weekends.

Whenever he has time to kill, such as when traveling or waiting in line at a store, he uses the opportunity to play games on his phone. “I have a team of grandmasters that create interesting chess-related games,” he says. Lately, he has been playing a text-based, multiplayer role-playing game called Avalon. It is played in real time, so players are constantly thinking about the next move. “It’s a mythological environment where you can create your own character and move through over 20,000 locations over 19 continents,” Mr. Carlsen says. “It’s easy to get caught up and play for hours.”

The Diet
Mr. Carlsen eats a mostly vegetarian diet. For breakfast, he makes a superfood smoothie with ingredients like açaí berry and hemp milk, or he’ll have a fresh pressed green juice, with ginger and lemon. Lunch is a salad topped with avocado, walnuts or pumpkin seeds. He likes Asian flavors and often makes a vegetable stir fry over brown rice for dinner. During tournaments he focuses on getting enough protein to maintain his energy over long time periods. He relies on plant proteins like beans, nuts, seeds or hemp protein and drinks water throughout the tournament.

Cost & Gear
He spends $30 a month on soccer dues. He likes soccer cleats made by Warrior. “I like to keep things simple and wear whatever is in my closet. I’m not overly picky about the brands I wear to work out.”

Playlist
“I listen to a lot of rock music when I run, but my playlist is very diversified. One thing all of my music has in common is that it’s upbeat and keeps my momentum up.” His fight song is by gangsta rapper Lil Jon, with a title that can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

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Magnus Carlsen came within an inch of beating Sergey Karjakin in what our commentator Peter Svidler described as “an epic game”. What developed into a 7-hour thriller started with a Berlin Defence where it seemed the only talking point would be a puzzling rook shuffle in the opening. A couple of inaccuracies, though, and Magnus was scenting blood. You had the feeling almost anyone else in world chess would have gone down without a fight, but Karjakin clung on for dear life and got the draw his bravery deserved – even if he needed some help from his opponent!

This was the day the 2016 World Chess Championship match began in earnest, with both players coming close enough to taste victory and defeat. It left them visibly shell-shocked, with neither certain if Magnus had ever had a clear win within his grasp (our silicon friends answer in the affirmative).

It was a remarkable journey from a game which started with a 5.Re1 Berlin that failed to set the pulses racing. Eyebrows were at least raised by Carlsen’s retreat 10.Re2:

The move, of course, looks a little ridiculous, but it turned out what was much stranger was that Sergey and his team had apparently overlooked a move that had been played by players as familiar as Igor Kovalenko, Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Paco Vallejo, with the latter tweeting the lapidary:

Karjakin thought the move had been played in other positions, but not this one, and spent a full 25 minutes before coming up with 10…b6, looking to capitalise with 11…Ba6. Magnus repeated Kasimdzhanov’s 11.Re1, which led to one of the funniest moments of the post-game press conference. When Anastasia Karlovich asked if 10.Re2 had been a slip Magnus decided to roll with it and drew laughter with:

“Yeah, it slipped out of my hand, so I moved it back to e1 the next move!”

So a quarter of the match has already gone by and the players are still locked together:

Tune in at 2pm EST (8pm CET) on Tuesday.

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The 2016 FIDE World Chess Championship is a 12-game match taking place between Norwegian World Champion Magnus Carlsen and his Russian challenger, Sergey Karjakin. They play in the Fulton Market building in the Seaport District of Lower Manhattan, New York, beginning on November 11 and ending on November 30, if tiebreaks are required. The prize fund is at least 1 million euros, with the winner taking 60%, or 55% if the match goes to tiebreaks.

The players have 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves, then 15 minutes to the end of the game, with a 30-second increment from move 1. The first player to reach 6.5 points is the winner, with a 6-6 tie decided by four 25 minute + 10 second/move rapid games. If still tied two 5+3 games are played, then another two 5+3 if needed, then finally an Armageddon game, where White has 5 minutes to Black’s 4, but a draw will make the black player World Champion.

Official website: nyc2016.fide.com
Download Regulations for the FIDE World Championship Match (FWCM) 2016 in PDF format.

World Champion Magnus Carlsen was in good form at the opening press conference of the 2016 FIDE World Chess Championship in the Fulton Market Building in New York. He talked up Sergey Karjakin’s resilience in defence, only to express the desire to knock him down, and answered a question on the best player in the world: “If I may be so bold, I would say myself!” Karjakin had some good lines of his own, though, as they prepare to face off tomorrow in Game 1 of the match.

The seven participants spoke first in the order in which they were seated: FIDE VP Israel Gelfer, Agon CEO Ilya Merenzon, Phosagro CEO Andrey Guryev, EG Capital Advisors’ Michael Stanton (both representing sponsors), Magnus Carlsen, Sergey Karjakin and Chief Arbiter Takis Nikolopoulos. That meant we had to wait a while to get to the players, and there were some awkward moments. Gelfer became the second person at a press conference about the match to refer to the Kasparov-Karpov match in New York in 1990, which makes it seem that the 1995 Kasparov-Anand clash on the top of the World Trade Center is being airbrushed out of history as not an “official” FIDE match.

The most substantial answer of the day was when Carlsen was asked about his opponent’s best quality:

Sergey is very well-prepared. He has studied the game very well, is very knowledgeable and, most of all, he’s extremely resilient in defence. He’s very, very good in finding resources even in difficult positions – finding positions he can defend. For me, it’s a matter of when I get the chance I’ll try to punch him until he finally knocks over!

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A solid start for both players, but little to write home about. The relatively quick end meant that Robin van Kampen’s dream of commentating on a 7-hour game was thwarted, since he now heads off to university, but you can watch his last commentary with Eric on the 2016 World Championship match below:

So the players go into the first rest day tied on 1:1. Karjakin’s manager said in the same interview quoted above that he wouldn’t rule out 12 draws, but let’s hope this is just the calm before the storm. Peter Svidler will be in our Hamburg studio alongside Eric Hansen to commentate on Game 3 of the match on Monday, when Magnus will again have the white pieces. Will he remain faithful to the Tromp? We’ll soon find out!

Tune in at 2pm EST (8pm CET) on Monday!

Garry Kasparov: “I think the players in this world championship are in different leagues. Karjakin is excellent—Carlsen is special.”

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The World Chess Championship in New York City got off to a relatively quiet start on Friday with a draw in Game 1 that was tense at times, but lacked pyrotechnics.

Magnus Carlsen, the defending champion, had White. After a ceremonial first move by the actor Woody Harrelson, Carlsen surprised Sergey Karjakin, the challenger from Russia, and also many of the grandmasters watching the game in the venue in the Fulton Market building in the South Street Seaport, by essaying the Trompowsky Attack. Though the opening sounds dangerous, it is slightly off-beat and is not thought to pose great difficulties for Black.

Carlsen played quickly during the opening, indicating that he had prepared the Trompowsky for the match, while Karjakin took more time, clearly proceeding cautiously in his first World Championship game. With a couple of precise maneuvers, Karjakin avoided any problems and, after only 19 moves, most of the major pieces for both sides had already been exchanged.

Carlsen, who had a slightly better pawn structure, continued to press on – something that he is noted for and that has brought him success in the past. He may have also continued to play because he wanted to test Karjakin and try to put some psychological pressure on him. But Karjakin is noted for his defensive ability and he had no trouble.

The game lasted four hours and was drawn after 42 moves.

In the press conference afterward, both Carlsen and Karjakin agreed that if Carlsen had any chances to win, they ended when he played 27 f4, allowing Karjakin to shut down any opportunities for Carlsen to penetrate on the kingside.

The entire broadcast of the game can be replayed below.

Game 2 is on Saturday and begins at 2 PM EST. Karjakin will have White.
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Every generation is marked by a few great players, but they are eventually supplanted by younger ones. In 2013, a new era was ushered in as Magnus Carlsen ascended to the throne.

Every World Champion for the last few decades started out as a prodigy.

Boris Spassky became a grandmaster in 1955 at age 18 – at the time, the youngest in the world. Less than three years later, he was overtaken and surpassed by his great rival, Bobby Fischer, who qualified for the Candidates tournament to select a challenger for the title at age 15.

In the years to come, there would be Anatoly Karpov (World Champion at 24) and his nemesis, Garry Kasparov, who dethroned Karpov in 1985 to become champion at age 22.

Into this tradition of great young players stepped Viswanathan Anand.

In 1987, he became the first Indian to win the World Junior Championship. A year later, he was the first Indian to earn the grandmaster title. By the mid-1990s, he was unquestionably among the world’s elite and played Garry Kasparov for the World Championship atop the World Trade Center, a match that Anand lost.

It was only after the retirement of Kasparov in 2005, and Anand’s victory in the World Championship tournament in Mexico City in 2007 that Anand fully came into his own. He was 37 at the time, and finally undisputed World Champion. For the next five years, he fended off challengers, all of his generation. But it was inevitable that eventually someone from the next generation, another prodigy, would rise to challenge for the crown. To most experts, that next challenger had seemed all-but-preordained – it was Magnus Carlsen.

Magnus Carlsen during Game 5 of the 2013 World Championship match in Chennai, India.

Carlsen’s rise had been phenomenal. He earned the grandmaster title at the age of 13 years and almost 5 months – the third youngest in history. Over the years he steadily climbed in the rankings, piling up successes, even against the world’s best players.

Carlsen became the No. 1 player in the world in January 2010, when he was 19. Though Anand briefly overtook him in late 2010 and early 2011, Carlsen regained the top spot in July 2011 and has held it ever since.

Carlsen had a chance to play for the World Championship in 2012, but he had passed it up, protesting that the format favored players who had been seeded into the Candidates from previous cycles. His decision not to participate disappointed many fans.

The next time the Candidates rolled around, in London in March 2013, the World Chess Federation, also known as FIDE, had changed the rules on qualification, meeting some of Carlsen’s previous objections. The format was a double round-robin (each player faced every other player twice, once with each color). Despite losing in the last round, Carlsen won on tie-break over Vladimir Kramnik and earned the right to challenge Anand.

The World Championship matches of 2013, and later 2014, were real battles of the generations because Carlsen was almost 21 years younger than Anand.

The first match was played in Chennai (formerly Madras), India, the city where Anand grew up. No World Championship match had previously been held in India, so local interest was tremendous and perhaps affected Anand’s performance.

The format was the same as for all the matches since 2006: best-of-twelve classical games, with a play-off of rapid games (and then blitz) if required.

Play began on Nov. 9, 2013, with Carlsen having White. The first game was drawn after only 16 moves, with the Norwegian challenger looking somewhat nervous. He was apparently content to ease himself into the struggle against an opponent who was very seasoned in match-play. Even though a 12-game match is only half the length of the world title matches that were routinely played in the twentieth century, it is still a long-distance race, not a sprint.

Throughout the match, Carlsen mostly managed to avoid Anand’s opening preparation, which was one of his strengths in his career and which had helped him hold the title for five years. Carlsen also proved to be by far the more precise in endgames, pressing successfully for victories in endings in Games 5 and 6 that many grandmasters would have likely settled for a draw. Carlsen’s determination to squeeze every last minute advantage out of seemingly quiet positions was already his trademark and even the normally solid Anand made some surprising misjudgments in this phase of some games.

After two more draws, and with time running out to make up his deficit in the match, Anand went for an all-out kingside attack in Game 9. It looked very promising, although analysis afterwards indicated that Black could hold the draw. Suddenly, Anand made a terrible miscalculation at move 28 and had to resign after Carlsen’s reply.

Magnus Carlsen with the winner’s wreath during the awards ceremony of the 2013 World Championship match.

The score now stood at 6-3 with Anand needing to win three in a row to force a tiebreak. But Carlsen had the better of Game 10 and eventually forced a draw to take the title.

Some commentators started to write Anand off, even speculating he might retire, but only a few months later, in March 2014, he confounded all the doubters by winning the Candidates tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. Anand did so without losing any of his 14 games against seven of the best players in the world. He had earned the right to meet Carlsen again.

Their second match was played on neutral territory in Sochi, Russia, in a venue built for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Anand may have felt less pressure not having to play in front of a home crowd and he had certainly regained confidence from his fine Candidates result, but Carlsen was still the favorite to win.

The match, which began on Nov. 8, 2014, proved much more tense and dramatic than its predecessor. There was even one moment — though quite brief — that could have led to a totally different final result.

In the first game Anand lost the initiative with White but managed to hold the draw in a slightly tricky situation. In Game 2, he came under very heavy pressure and eventually cracked and lost. The difference this time was that he rebounded immediately as Carlsen fell into his preparation in Game 3. The Indian grandmaster won comfortably to level the score. Whereas Carlsen had not lost a single game in the first match, he now knew he was in for a tougher fight.

Two hard-fought draws followed and then came the sixth game and the decisive incident in the match, a surprising instance of mutual “chess blindness.” After 25 moves, Anand (playing Black) was under pressure in a queenless middle-game but Carlsen had some pawn weaknesses offering potential for counterplay. Then this happened:

At move 26 Carlsen wanted to transfer his king to the kingside and carelessly played 26 Kd2? allowing 26…Nxe5 (threatening …Nxc4 with check) which would have turned an inferior position into one that was virtually winning for Anand. But Anand rapidly continued with his plan of 26…a4??, after which Carlsen brought his king to safety with 27 Ke2.

The live video showed the relief on Carlsen’s face (he actually laid his head down on his arms, as seen above); he had clearly realized the blunder he had made but had managed not to give any indication to his opponent. Anand must have realized now that he had missed the moment; his position was now inferior and psychologically he seemed broken. Carlsen went on to win this game and take the lead in the match, whereas he could easily have been down one game.

A hard-fought draw followed in Game 7 in which Carlsen tested his opponent in a marathon endgame, just the type of situation where Anand had collapsed in the previous match. This time, though, he held the draw with accurate play.

Game 8 also was drawn, thanks to Carlsen’s opening preparation, and in Game 9 the Norwegian “wasted” a White, forcing a quick draw as he drew nearer the finishing line. In Game 10, Anand obtained a slight advantage but Carlsen held the draw; the score was now 5.5-4.5.

Though Anand had performed better than in the first match, time was again running out for him.. In Game 11, Anand, who had Black, looked as if he was playing for a solid draw (with hopes to win with White in the final regulation game). Then he suddenly saw an opportunity for active counterplay with a pawn sacrifice at move 23. The position was very unclear but his follow-up exchange sacrifice at move 27 was based on a miscalculation. Carlsen found the refutation and won both the game and the match. Although the end was disappointing, this had been a complex game worthy of a World Championship match.

EPILOGUE: The 2016 cycle leading up to the World Championship match in New York next week not only produced a new challenger, Sergey Karjakin, but one of a new generation. The changing of the guard is complete. And the match ahead looks very intriguing.

Karjakin and Carlsen are two former child prodigies (the youngest and third-youngest grandmasters in history, respectively), born in the same year (January 1990 for Karjakin, November for Carlsen) whose careers for many years developed in close parallel.

In 2007, Carlsen’s rating started to forge ahead and he climbed into the top five in the world. From 2010, after Karjakin moved to Russia and changed federations in 2009 (he was born in Crimea, in Ukraine, before it was annexed by Russia in 2014) Karjakin began to catch up. In addition, he won some important tournaments ahead of Carlsen, notably the elite Norway tournaments in 2013 and 2014. Nonetheless, Carlsen is much higher rated (2853 to 2772) and their most recent game, played at Bilbao in July, ended in victory for Carlsen, who also convincingly won that tournament. With his higher rating and greater match experience, the Norwegian is a firm favorite to retain the world title.

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Leaders emerge at European Chess Club Cup. Alkaloid Skopje and Cercle d’Echecs Monte-Carlo are the leaders of the Open and Women’s sections, respectively, after five rounds of play at the 2016 European Club Cup in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Alkaloid defeated the strong team Mednyi Vsadnik from St.Petersburg by 3,5-2,5. The loss of Ding Liren to Peter Svidler was overturned by Dmitry Andreikin and Yuriy Kryvorucko.

Syberia remains in contention to defend the last year’s title after scoring against Ashdod. On the shared third place are as many as eight teams with 8 points each. The remaining two rounds promise to be very exciting!

European Chess Club Cup 2016