Corus chess tournament got over yesterday. It was as exciting as it can get. Anand and Topalov both finished first with +5 score. Anand was leading in the first half. And then after his loss to Kamsky, Topalov took over for the second half. In the last round Anand beat Gelfand to join Topalov. Whenever I got up early enough I saw the games live. They were really fun to watch.
But the amount of preparation which happens at this level makes me sick. Nowadays it is not surprising to see novelties coming at move 20 or above. If a nice sac happens before move 20, it is definitely a home preparation. It is not to say that the players are less capable over the board. But the amount of chess outside the board seems to be a lot more. Unless Fisher-Random or some variant becomes popular, home preparation is going to dominate.
Article in yahoo finance “why what’s good for India is good for us”.
I had a new year resolution and I already broke it. I wanted to play less online chess. But I already spent a lot of time today playing blitz and lightning at fics. It all starts with the regular nightly 5 round, 5 min blitz tournament, which is at 10 pm everyday. I usually think about just playing that and quitting. But it never stops. I end up playing for another 1 to 2 hours. I want to stop playing atleast the lightning which is a crazy 1 minute game.
It does not improve the game much. Atleast not proportional to the time spent. If that much of time is spent in reading a chess book there will be much more gain. Instead of online chess I am going to try to pick up a book now onwards.
The new FIDE chess rating list is published. As expected Tapolav overtook Anand for second place. He also broke the 2800 barrier to reach 2801. Only three players Kasparov, Kramnik and Topalov have crossed 2800 till now. The top 10 are
- Kasparov, Garry 2812
- Topalov, Veselin 2801
- Anand, Viswanathan 2792
- Svidler, Peter 2765
- Aronian, Levon 2752
- Kramnik, Vladimir 2741
- Leko, Peter 2740
- Ivanchuk, Vassily 2729
- Gelfand, Boris 2723
- Ponomariov, Ruslan 2723
I upgraded to wordpress 2.0. The backend looks much better. In the front there is no difference. Once again great work. It comes included with Akismet anti-spam system. I have to wait and see how this works.