CHESS #631

Pavel Eljanov won the Astrakhan Grand Prix, scoring 8 points from 13 games with a scoreline of +5,-2,=6. He was followed by Ponomariov, Jakovenko, Mamedaryov Alekseev and Radjabov who all scored 7. At the other end were three out of form stars, Gelfand, Svidler and Ivanchuk who respectively occupied 10-12.

Seven of the eight 2012 Candidates are now known. Aronyan is the GP champion with wins in Sochi, and Nalchik and second at Jermuk (the three best scores count). Radjabov clinched second (second at Sochi, second at Astrakhan and champion at Elista). Aronyan and Radjabov join Kramnik, Topalov, Carlsen, Gelfand, and Kamsky. The eighth man will be a wild-card.

Baku is likely to host the Candidates and either of the Azeri GMs Vugar Gashimov or Shakhriyar Mamedaryov could get the wild card. But Aronyan is Armenian and the two countries are technically at war (remember Nagorny-Kharabakh). Hence, Aronyan could have visa issues and he is more than uncomfortable about playing in Baku.

The US Championship saw Gata Kamsky take the title in tie-breaks from Yuri Shulman. The last game saw an interesting game-theoretic experiment. It was played at draw odds (black wins if there’s a draw) with five-seconds increment/move. The players secretly bid the amount of time they wanted, with a max of 60 minutes. The lower bidder got choice of colour, while times were adjusted as bid. Gata bid 25 minutes to Shulman’s 39 minutes. He picked black and held the draw.

Fabrice Touvron has done a massive number-crunching exercise to work out numbers by rating classes, nations, etc. The pyramid is top-heavy. Almost 43,000 players have ratings above 2,000, while 32,000 rate between 1,800-2,000 and just 20,000 have ratings below 1,800. This could be partly because many below-1,800s rapidly improve. But organisers looking to increase the player-base should think about how to pull in more newbies.

The top seven Federations — Germany, Russia, Spain, France, India, Poland, Hungary — have about the same number of rated players as the other 136 member-nations combined! The PRC has less than 500 rated players despite its array of top-class GMs and women world champions.

The purpose of this statistical exercise was markedly political. Fide elections are due at the upcoming Olympiad. The big federations resent the one-nation, one-vote system and would like to move to proportional representation. Despite that agenda, it’s an illuminating exercise.

The Diagram WHITE TO PLAY (Svidler vs Gelfand, Astrakhan GP 2010) is between two of the also-rans who shared 10-11. Here White found 22.Bxd4! Bxd4 23.Nxg6+! Kg7 – if 23.--hxg6 24. Qh6#. Now 24.Nxf8 Kxf8 25.Qh6+ Ke7 26.c3 Bf6 27.Rfe1 f4 28.d4 Ne6 29.e5 dxe5 30.Qxh7+ Kd8 31.Qf7 (1-0) is an efficient mop-up.