Zhao Xue failed to maintain her stratospheric tournament performance rating at the Nalchik Grand Prix. A last round loss to compatriot Ju Wenjun pulled her TPR down to 2828. Of course Zhao still won by a mile, with 9.5 points from 11 games while Jun bagged second place on 7 points. Ekaterina Kovalevskaya and Viktorija Cmilyle shared 3-4 on 6 points each. If Zhao had won her last round, she would finished with a TPR of 3000-plus.
Vlad Kramnik did manage to take a 2903 TPR last week against opposition as good as Anish Giri, Maxime Vachier Lagrave and Judit Polgar. Kramnik scored 4.5 points from 6 in a double RR at the Hoogeveen Crown Group. This will pull his rating back above the 2800-mark.
Chessbase is using Hoogeveen to showcase the big new feature in the latest version of its flagship engine, Fritz 13. Let’s check ™ is a crowd sourcing concept where analysis by any engine can be dumped in the cloud and the cloud database can be accessed by any user.
This has amazing implications. The strength of engine analysis is partially dependent on algorithms, partly on the hardware, and on the ingenuity with which a human user looks at specific lines. If very strong multi-core engine evaluations are openly available, the last factor gains in importance.
One can also conceptualise ways to use the cloud to generate larger tablebases via cooperation. All positions with a maximum of six pieces have already been worked out. Quite a few seven piece situations are also known.
By splitting up the task between multiple, multi-core machines, tablebases with more pieces may be generated at greater speed. The holy grail is of course, be the 32-piece tablebase, which would mean a solution to the game. That is probably a century, or perhaps, a millennia in the future!
The diagram, WHITE TO PLAY, (Kramnik Vs Giri, Hoogeveen 2011) is an object lesson in how strong human beings can hold onto the thread of play even if they are imprecise with specific moves.
Kramnik carried out a sharp intuitive attack with 22.c5! Nd4 23.Rxd4! Bxd4 24.cxd6 Ng8 25.Nd5 Kh8. Even after 25. --Rc8 26. Rc7+ is deadly. So far, so good. 26.Rc7 Be5 27.Bb2 ?! The first and only serious inaccuracy 27. Re7 Bg7 28. Rxb7 was much easier.
Giri responded 27.-- Qxd6 28.Rxb7 g5 29.b6 a5 30.Bh5! Rab8. The threat was something like 30.--a4 31. Bg6! Ne7 32. Qb4! Now after 31.Ra7 Bxb2 32.Qxb2+ Nf6 33.Bf7! Kg7 34.Rd7 ?! Qc6 35.Be6+ (1-0) Another killer line was 34. Be6+ Kg6 35. Ne7+ Kh5 36. Qe2+. But white's move is good enough to force 35. - Kg6 36. Ne7+.
Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player
