Kamsky second chess career

Gata shows his teeth
By Malcolm Pein
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 12/12/2007

Gata Kamsky’s second chess career continues to gain momentum as he eliminated the 17 year old prodigy Magnus Carlsen from the FIDE World Cup to move just one match away from a world title final eliminator against Veselin Topalov. The American GM retired from top class chess in 1997 to study law but is now back at the board full time.

After a quick draw with Black in the first game Kamsky outplayed the Norwegian with white and not for the first time in this tournament employed a slightly unusual line to good effect. Carlsen went badly wrong in the middlegame and found one of his rooks trapped.

Kamsky won the exchange and then gave a textbook demonstration of how to exploit a material advantage while not giving the opponent even a hint of counterplay – it looked quite Karpovian.

The match between Alexey Shirov and Sergey Karjakin went to speed chess tie breaks after Shirov produced a new wrinkle playing black in the Ruy Lopez and made light of the difficulties he was confronted with by engineering a series of piece exchanges.

Here is the full article with game analysis.