Nakamura Key Games at US Championship 2012
In the recent US 2012 Championships, there was a thrilling Sicilian Dragon Game – Hikaru Nakamura vs Ray Robson. Here is a video annotation of that game
The game shows amazingly precise calculation skills of the now 2012 US Champion Nakamura, and the endgame in particular is sure to go down in the collection of “Immortal Games” of Nakamura, who is arguably one of the most exciting Grandmasters at the top level (2700+) in the game today.
The big crunch game came when Naka faced his closest rival Gata Kamsky. It was a complex strategical batttle revolving around the d5 square and if black could generate sufficient counterplay to overcome White’s light square control. In the end, Black played extremely resourcefully to create a very dangerous passed ‘a’ pawn which White was virtually helpless to defend against.
In the final round, Nakamura played a very surprising second move against veteran GM Yasser Seirawan – a GM of huge experience, who was one of the few GMs ever to beat Garry Kasparov in a Chess Olympiad.
Yasser seem to be forced into improvising early in this game which was a La Bourdannais variation of the French defence. He expressed some regret later about how he recaptured on f5 as if exf5 might have been stronger than gxf5 which gave him the h pawn liability.
With this win, Nakamura came ahead of his nearest rival Gata Gamsky with a score of 8.5/11
Final Result tables can be found here:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=77376&crosstable=1
Who is speaking in the video?