Marathon man

Marathon man
Boris Gelfand, the Israeli number one and top seed triumphed at the FIDE World Cup held at Khanty Mansisyk in Siberia.

By Malcolm Pein
Published: 10:59AM GMT 21 Dec 2009

Gelfand qualifies for the Candidates Matches the qualifying stage of the 2012 WCC. The World Cup was a seven round KO which started with 128 players from all over the world. Each round consisting of two Classical Chess games followed by Rapid Chess and if required, Blitz Chess tiebreaks.

I thought Gelfand was well set when I saw him sporting a remarkable hat which looked like it had been fashioned from the fur of three mammoths. Gelfand was ready for the Siberian winter and well prepared over the board.

In the final he faced former FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov. The four Classical games were drawn but Gelfand won the second Rapid before Ponomariov managed to stay in the match by winning the fourth – see below. So the match went to Blitz. Gelfand won, Ponomariov replied before Gelfand won two in a row to win 7-5. Gelfand took home $96,000 with Ponomariov winning $64,000. Overall there was $1.5 million in prize money of which 20 per cent went to FIDE.

This was a fantastic achievement by Gelfand, even though he was the highest rated player he was also one of the oldest and the three week event is a marathon in chess terms. Gelfand played 36 games; 14 Classical, 16 Rapid, and 6 Blitz and lost only once, in a Classical game against Judit Polgar who launched an audacious attack we saw here a couple of weeks ago. In the last five rounds Gelfand eliminated Judit Polgar, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Dimitry Jakovenko, all on tie break then Sergey Karjakin, and finally Ponomariov.

Here is the full article.