Friday December 25, 2009
Winning edge
CHESS
By QUAH SENG SUN
Experience gives players the edge over the competition.
THE results of two recent chess tournaments here and elsewhere have left me doubly convinced that experience can be a great leveller. Time and again, the player with the greater experience has shown the resilience to come up tops in chess events.
In faraway Khanty-Mansiysk, the experience of a 41-year-old Boris Gelfand triumphing over 26-year-old Ruslan Ponomariov in the Chess World Cup knock-out tournament was a typical example.
Gelfand was the oldest player in the tournament but in 26-year-old Ponomariov, he was facing a former Fide world champion in 2002 who knew his way around the chessboard.
Many did not expect Gelfand to last the distance against the younger Ponomariov. The previous six rounds had been gruelling enough and in the final, Ponomariov had been expected to play better in the rapidchess tie-break games should their classical time control games ended drawn.
Sure enough, all four of the classical games were drawn and the two players went on to play rapidchess. However, they also ended with a drawn result and so, everything boiled down to blitz chess. Here, Gelfand sprang the greatest surprise by beating Ponomariov 3-1, thus ending the latter’s hopes of winning the Chess World Cup.
Here is the full article.
Smyslov was the oldest to qualify for the candidates matches.