Chess (#1025)

While there are many open events, India has few serious round-robins. The All India Chess Federation- Airports Authority of India Cup fills that gap. The last edition featured superstars, Fabiano Caruana and Hou Yifan.

This year, the six player field is of near-even strength. The lowest-rated is Parimarjan Negi (2641) while Radoslaw Wojtaszek is the highest rated (2734). Everybody has suffered at least one loss and also won at least one game.

Anton Korobov and Evgeny Alekseev share the lead with 4 points each after seven rounds. Wojtaszek and Sasikiran are on 3.5 while Abhijeet Gupta and Negi "trail" with 3 each. With three rounds left, anyone could in theory, win.

 

Making predictions about 2013 trends is likely to be a mug's game. But Carlsen is likely to push his rating higher. The other odds-on bet is that several others will cross the Elo 2800-barrier. Apart from Kramnik and Aronyan, Radjabov, Caruana, Anand and Karjakin are likely 2800-candidates.

The world champion, who won the CNN-IBN Indian of the Year award, announced at the ceremony that he intends to play seven events in the first half of 2013. He also said he hasn't figured out exactly what the problem is with his poor form. Anand may just play himself back into form, or at least gather enough data to pinpoint problem areas. The flipside is, he may tire himself out and start making errors due to lack of energy.

On the silicon side, as the cloud catches on, crowd-sourced analysis could start cracking positions even multi-core engines find intractable. Analysis can be cached, letting specific engines examine details in unheard-of-depth. In the past few months, we've also seen better analysis of fortresses — situations where computers are unreliable. Also, tablebases which store cached analysis of endgames, are getting better with more efficient formats.

The diagram, BLACK TO PLAY, (Uhlmann Vs Sachdev Podebrady 2012) shows how difficult "simple endgame calculation" is. Even a high-end engine takes a while to realise black has only one drawing move and Tania missed 46...Kf6!

She played 46 --- a6? Uhlmann counter-blundered with 47.e3? Instead 47.e4! wins after 47...dxe3 48.fxe3 Kf6 49.e4 fxe4 50.dxe4 c4 51.e5+ Ke6 52.Ke4 c3 53.Kd3 Kxe5 54.Kxc3 (or 47...c4 48.dxc4 d3 49.exf5+ Kf6 50.Ke3). Black can go for either pawn but geometry ensures white's pawn queens and controls the black queening square.

Tania found 47...c4! 48.dxc4. Black also wins after 48.exd4 c3 49.Ke3 f4+ 50.Ke2 Kd5 51.Kd1 Kxd4 52.Kc2 f3-+ 48...d3 49.Kf3 Ke5 (0-1). If 50.e4 f4! 51.c5 Ke6 52.c6 Kd6 53.Kxf4 d2-+ but 50.e4 fxe4+? 51. Ke3 Kd6 52. f3 draws. Try calculating the variations through both in the game as well as after 46.--- Kf6. You'll learn a lot.

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Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player