Amazing Chess Brilliancy of Vishy Anand
Posted: 01/18/2013 8:19 am
Lubomir Kavalek
International Chess Grandmaster
“It could easily be one of my best games,” said the world champion Vishy Anand after he brilliantly defeated the Armenian grandmaster Levon Aronian in the fourth round of the traditional Tata Steel Chess Tournament in the Dutch coastal town of Wijk aan Zee this week. The game would make a nice addition to Anand’s award-winning collection of his well-annotated games, published by Gambit Publications.
Anand’s victory reminds us that the ghosts of the glorious chess past are still alive. After the game, the Indian grandmaster said that it looked incredibly close to the classic duel between Gersz Rotlewi and Akiba Rubinstein, a marvelous tactical masterpiece played more than a century ago. Today, computers would have won the game differently than Rubinstein, depriving us of seeing one of the finest combinations in chess history. Let’s have a look at both games.
Aronian, the last year’s winner at Wijk aan Zee and currently rated number three in the world, talked about falling into an opening trap in the Semi-Slav defense, but it was not that simple. Anand acknowledged that he prepared the variation for the last year’s world championship match against Boris Gelfand, but didn’t say where precisely the preparation ended and the game began. His three seconds, Rustam Kasimzhanov, Radek Wojtazsek and Surya Shekhar Ganguly, used the idea after the match, but their games didn’t not take the path chosen by Aronian. And Anand used it in a spectacular way.
Anand’s love of the Semi-Slav defense goes way back. In 1991 in Brussel, the then 21-year-old Indian grandmaster made headlines by exchanging punches with the former world champion Anatoly Karpov during their quarterfinal Candidates match. The Semi-Slav was Anand’s main defense. The score was tied before the last game.
More here.
Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
Anand is best.