GM Jon Ludvig Hammer, participant of the 2009 SPICE Cup A group, and #2 ranked Norwegian (only behind Magnus Carlsen), now has his own blog! Very cool!
Here is a sample of his latest post:
Winning!
August 6, 2010
by Jon Ludvig
After a couple of bad results, you start to appreciate the wins so much, much more. I was generously given two straight whites, and thanked Caissa for her trust in me by scoring two good wins.
In round 3, against the Austrian FM Platzgummer, I got a completely dominating position and I made a big mistake by capitalizing on the domination too soon by entering a pawn-up rook ending. I should have improved my position much more, for instance by f4! which works tactically as Rxe4 loses to Nb8! With the e4-f3-g4 structure, I thought I had an optimal position as I can give the f3-pawn without allowing black to get a passed pawn in the near future. With hindsight, it’s very difficult, maybe even impossible since black’s king is very close and will give white many headaches in trying to promote the pawn. Luckily, my opponent played Rh1, which is certainly a mistake. Rb5! is good, but I think I should have played Kd4 instead of Kd2 afterwards. I thought the setup I got in the game was easily winning, but truth is that black’s active rook and king is troublesome. We got the following interesting position pretty much by force:
Go here for more of his posts: http://gmhammer.wordpress.com/blog
So the “L” stands for Ludwig, not Luigi?
Mr. L would like to talk with you.