Day two of the World Rapids 2015

Day two of the World Rapids and we witnessed five more exciting rounds. After ten rounds we have two leaders. One is the expected world number one and reigning World Champion, Magnus Carlsen, and the other is the totally unexpected Sergei Zhigalko from Belarus. Both of them are on 8.0/10.

Always in limelight, the reigning World Champion in all formats of the game, Magnus Carlsen

Although Magnus is playing the entire tournament in excellent style not having lost a single game, he was very close to defeat against the young talented Russian Danii Dubov. Let's have a look at the golden opportunity missed by Danii to beat the World number one:

"Want a draw?"

"You missed an easy win, now wait a bit!"

Ok, I don't see anything let's split the point!

The surprise package of the tournament has been Sergei Zhigalko who has set the tournament on fire with scintillating performance

At a rating of 2698 Sergei is already gaining 50 Elo points and has already beaten players like Gelfand and Nepomniachtchi.

Two of the thinnest people in the chess world: Amruta is cheering for Sergei in this tournament!

The two leaders are being followed by a pack of three players on 7.5/10 - Kovalenko, Kramnik and Ivanchuk.

Igor Kovalenko has earned the respect of many with his accurate play in this format

Old is gold: Vladimir Kramnik on 7.5/10

Old is gold 2: Vasily Ivanchuk doing well in the tournament

After acquainting ourselves with the leaders, let's have a look at how the Indians fared yesterday.

Vidit who started superbly with 4.0/5 yesterday was slowed down yesterday with three draws and two losses to Mamedyarov (above) and Bacrot

Although Vidit slowed down a bit, his performance of 5.5/10 is still commendable. He has played all players higher than his rating and is gaining 60 Elo points....

Mamedyarov-Vidit

....but one would expect a solid player like Vidit to hold this position with black against anyone in the world.

Vishy Anand has not been able to impress at the World Rapids and currently is on 5.5/10

After 2.5/5 yesterday, Anand picked up speed by beating Belov and Volokitin. But then he lost to Mamedov in a crazily complicated game. He won in the ninth round against Bologan. But tenth round turned into a heartbreak. After playing an opening which completely went his way, Vishy simply faltered.

Khismatulin - Anand

Black to play. What would you do?

Vishy has sacrificed a piece and has a dnagerous initiative. Here the strongest would have been to simply take the pawn on h3 with 14...Bxh3. Now a mate is threatened on g2 and if 15.Ng3 then after Qh4, there are threats like Bf5 or Bf1 which simply cannot be controlled. Instead Vishy chose 14...Qh4 and then Khismatullin could save himself with 15.Nf4! The neat point being that Bxf4 exf4 introduces a weak back rank in black's position. The position was still complicated but Vishy had lost his chance and went on to lose the game.

The man of day two for India is definitely B.Adhiban! He played some excellent chess to be on 6.0/10 at the end of day two.

One of the biggest assets of Adhiban is his fighting spirit. After finishing day one on 3.0/5, he lost the first two games on day two. But he came back strongly to beat Mikhalevksi, Morozevich and Ivansevic in the last three rounds. The fact that he declined the three fold repetition against Morozevich and went for a win shows how ambitious he really is!

Surya Shekhar Ganguly is on 5.0/10 but he scored a huge upset beating....

....Ruslan Ponomariov, who is sporting an extremely weird hair-cut!

 Ponomariov-Ganguly

Black to play

Ponomariov thought he was in complete control at this point. But Ganguly struck back with the highly orginal tactic 24...Bxd3! The point of this combination is that 25.Nxd3 can be met with Qd7! when one of the knights will fall. To see this tactic in a short time control is really commendable. Ponomariov didn't accept the piece and went 25.Ka1 but after Be4! the bishop had found an ideal location.

Sasikiran is doing pretty well with 5.5/10. He drew against MVL and beat the talented Spaniard Anton Guijarro David. Yet, more is expected of him.

Sethuraman is currently struggling in the tournament with 3.5/10. He mananged to score only one point out of five on day two.

As we go into the last day, it doesn't seem that any Indian has any chances of a medal, but with a finish like 5.0/5 you never know! Till then, I leave you with some of the nice pictorial impressions from Berlin:

Some day I will be like him!

A German, Armenian and two Russians following different games captured in one frame!

That's what dedication is all about

Battle of generations - Fedoseev vs Gelfand

Vishy Anand going out of his way to kibitz the game of his friend Boris Gelfand

" I am the only one who has had Magnus Carlsen on the ropes!"

Chess can be a serious game sometimes....

....and sometimes a lot of fun!

A jam packed playing hall

You can follow the live action from the comfort of your home, but the best place is definitely on your father's shoulders!

A huge thanks to Elena Kashirskaya, Gregor Anthes, Nailya Bikmurzina for these wonderful pictures.

Live stream can be followed on the official website from 17.30 hrs IST

Vidit flawless at the World Rapids

It's a tournament with 158 players where 125 of them are above 2500 Elo! The World Rapid and Blitz championships are here and it is one of the biggest chess extravaganza that we can witness as a chess fan! The 15 round rapid event with a time control of 15 minutes + 10 seconds increment began on Saturday. Five rounds took place on day one. Before we get to the chess part and how the Indians fared, here's a picture gallery just to give you an idea as to how strong this tournament really is!

The World Champion is here to defend his Rapid and Blitz title that he won in Dubai 2014

India's Vishy Anand, five time World Champion, proving that age is just a number!

Push the h-pawn, sac, sac, mate! The stylish Levon Aronian rehearsing the ideas before the games begin

In a league of his very own is Vasily Ivanchuk

Arguably one of the best blitz players in the world - Ian Nepomniachtchi

Is this guy a chess machine? After 25 days of relentless games at the World Cup in Baku Sergey Karjakin is back on the chess board!

"Let's call it a day!" Boris Gelfand proposes a truce!

The Shak attack!

Always a force to reckon with: Teimour Radjabov

The Polish team of Bartel, Gajewski, Wojtaszek and Swiercz

The Russians have sent their best guys - Nepo, Karjakin, Rublevsky, Kramnik

One of my favourite authors and the lovely commentator Yasser Seirawan. But he was not the only legend in the playing hall...

....the tenth World Champion Boris Spassky speaks with his old friend Fridrik Olafsson

Now that you are aware of the stars participating in the event, you would be in a better position to appreciate the performance of the 21-year-old Indian youngster Vidit Gujrathi!

Vidit is currently on 4.0/5 and in the second position

At 2534 rapid rating, Vidit is clearly under-rated. Thanks to his great calculating abilities, he is already gaining 57 Elo points. So let's have a look as to how he performed in the first five rounds.

Round 1 Gadir Guseinov vs Vidit

White to play, how should White regain his pawn?

It's Gadir's turn to move. He played the atrocious move 13.h3? After 13...Nxe4 14.Rxe4 Bxg5 15.Ng5 Bf5 Black was just a pawn up and clearly better. So what should have White played in the above position? There was a very nice tactical variation starting with 13.Nxf6! Bxf6 14.Nxe5! So why did White give up his bishop on g5? Because after 14...Bxg5 15.Nxf7! Rxf7 16.Qxg5! and the queen on g5 is taboo as Re8 is a mate. Of course here Black can go 16...Qf8 and the position is round about equal. But you can understand how tactically alert White had to be in order to maintain the balance. Once 13.h3 was played, Vidit had very little difficulty in converting this into a win.

Round 2 Vidit vs Andrei Volokitin 

Black to play, what do you think about 50...Rd5?

Volokitin is a piece down but has excellent drawing chances because of the reduced material. All he needs to do is exchange the rooks. But the Ukrainian was in great hurry and played the move 50...Rd5?? Vidit was extremely alert as he went 51.Ng7+! Ke5 52.Ng4+ Kd4 (Ke4 loses to Nf6+) 53.Nf5+ Ke4 (Kc4 would lose to the nice trick any knight to e3 check!) 54.Nf6+ and the rook was lost and so was the game!

With this win Vidit was on 2.0/2. Of course Gadir Guseinov and Andrei Volokitin were strong, but nowhere near his next opponent's strength. Vidit now faced the formidable Alexander Grischuk with the black pieces.

With a rating of 2846, Grischuk is the second seed in the event

Vidit played a fantastic game to beat the top Russian player. Here's the entire game with some express analysis:

After a sparkling start with 3.0/3, Vidit showed that he is class act by not losing any of his next two games. He drew with white against Nepomniachtchi and with black against Peter Leko.

A screen capture from Vidit's fourth round game against Ian Nepomniachtchi

Vidit's performance was simply amazing, but what about India's ace player Viswanathan Anand? How did he fare? Things started pretty well for Vishy. He beat Kateryna Lagno in the first round and followed it up with a win against Alexander Onischuk. In the third round he drew his game against Salem Saleh in a completely crazy battle. Here's the last part of the game annotated by Albert Silver taken from the ChessBase report.

2.5/3 was not all a bad start. But then things started to fall apart for the Indian. In the fourth round he was caught by some excellent preparation done by Russian Danii Dubov.

Round 4, Dubov - Anand 

In the above position which has been seen many time in tournament praxis, Dubov came up with the novelty 12.a3!? It did not seem to deter Anand as he played quickly. After 15 moves we reach the follwing position.

How should White continue?

Dubov was clearly in his preparation as he blitzed out the move 16.g4! This created some big problems for Anand with g5 coming up. He tried to stop it with 16...f6 but the g6 square had been weakened terribly and he ended up with a bad position after 17.Nd6

Danii Dubov showed some amazing preparation to beat Vishy

In the fith round Vishy faced another Russian Pavel Ponkratov with the white pieces. In a French defence, Black got a very comfortable position in the early middlegame. Although the evaluation fluctuated a bit, by the time we reached the endgame Ponkratov was clearly better. 

 Round 5, Anand - Ponkratov

How should Black increase his advantage?

With such a dominating knight on e4, it's time to open up the position and Pavel did just that with the move 44...f4!

White to play. How do you evaluate 48.Nxd5

Vishy was already in big trouble and tried to complicate matter with 48.Nxd5 but after Kxd5 49.Rxe4 Rh3+ 50.Kg4 Kxe4 51.Kxh3 Rxf4. All the pawns remained on one side and the white king was sidelined on h3.

When the following position was reached, Vishy found nothing better but to throw in the towel

So a bad day for Vishy Anand who is now on 2.5/5 but Vidit more than made it up with his sizzling 4.0/5 performance. This is how the other Indians stand right now:

B.Adhiban: 3.0/5

Surya Shekhar Ganguly: 3.0/5 

(It must be mentioned that Surya has drawn with two very strong players: Kramnik and Andreikin)

Krishnan Sasikiran: 2.5/5

S.P. Sethuraman 2.5/5

Check out Adhiban's interesting video inside the confession box over here

In the sixth round Vidit faces Wojtaszek on the seventh board.

You can find the pairings and standings on chess-results website.

Karjakin, who is seen here with his friend Kateryna Lagno, is the sole leader with 4.5/5

There were so many top level contests taking place at the same time that...

... you could simply feel lost!

We look forward to five more exciting rounds on the day two of the World Rapid 2015

The beautiful pictures that you saw in this report have been taken from the official website. The photographers are Elena Kashirskaya, Gregor Anthes, Nailya Bikmurzina.

Official website

Live streaming of day one

Meeting a living legend!

The fourth Buddhi International open chess rating tournament was held in Sri Lanka from the 19th-23rd of September 2013. I won the tournament convincingly with a score of 8.5/9. Quite a good result, but I was strongest player in the event by quite some margin and it wasn't surprising that I emerged victorious.

The trophy, which right now sits in my showcase, is the best looking one that I have won in my chess career. Along with the trophy, they also gave me the following certificate:

As a chess player we have all won many such certificates and after a certain point the quantity increases to such an extent that you start to lose interest in keeping them neatly together. 

But something happened just two days ago, 5th of October 2015, which has made this very certificate one of my prized possessions. What exactly transpired was some sort of a dream come true.

Early in the morning, Amruta and I woke up lazy and irritated. The reason-  we had to go to the UK embassy in Mumbai to submit the documents and give our biometrics. The London Chess Classic is going to be held from the 4th to 13th of December 2015 and we had to apply for the UK visa. Our journey to the embassy consisted in discussing how irksome and problematic it is to apply for a visa every time you want to leave the country. Add to it the fact that you have to pay nearly Rs.9000/- for a UK visa (5000 for Schengen and much much more for USA visa) with chances that they might reject it, and you can understand our irritation at holding an Indian passport. But as they say, all things happen for a good reason! And if we didn't go to the embassy that day we wouldn't have been able to meet one of the greatest sporting legends the world has ever seen.

The UK embassy building from the outside

We sat in the waiting arena patiently biding our time. Suddenly I noticed a girl standing at one of the counters wearing a pink t-shirt, a long skirt and a pair of slippers. It didn't really seem as if she cared about dressing particularly well. She had well built muscles and her north-eastern look gave me a feeling of having seen her somewhere. At first I couldn't recollect, but suddenly it dawned on me... I had watched her innumerable times on television and also on the cover of a book that I possessed.

This cover of her autobiography in my mind came to my rescue as I tried to recognize the lady standing a few meters away

Come on! I pinched myself. This cannot be Magnificient Mary. A five-time boxing World Champion, Olympic Bronze medallist and a Gold Medal at the Asian Games. I told Amruta, "Look it's Mary Kom!" Startled a bit, she refused to believe me. Finally I convinced her to go and ask her if she was Mary Kom. When she went and asked, her coach replied, "Priyanka Chopra jaisi nahi dikhti hai na?" (She doesn't look like Priyanka Chopra, right?")

Priyanka Chopra acted as Mary Kom in the movie based on the latter's life

A story of how a girl from a small town in Manipur became a world champion in boxing. If you get hooked by the trailer, you can watch the full movie with English subtitles on Youtube for just Rs.50.

In September 2014, when Amruta went to National Women Challengers and was not doing so well, both of us went to an almost empty and wrecked theatre in Mapusa, Goa, and got inspired by the movie. Amruta finished strongly scoring 3.5 in her last four rounds.

When people realised that she was Mary Kom, they rushed towards her with papers and pens to get her autograph. I tried to find whatever piece of paper I had and the Sri Lankan certificate about which I wrote at the start of the article came in my hand. The quiet and discipline of the embassy had been broken. When I reached Mary, the guards had had enough and made me sit down in my chair. I slowly slid my certificate towards her and she gladly obliged.

These five words have made the Sri Lankan certificate my most valuable possession

The sports connection made talking to her quite easy. Mobile phones had to be switched off and we couldn't take a picture with her.
Mary Kom is going soon to London to train for the qualification to Rio 2016 Olympics. Winning a gold medal at the Rio is her final aim before retiring from boxing. But first she has to qualify for it from the AIBA World Women's Boxing Championships to be held in Astana, Kazakhstan from 24th of January to 1st February 2016. And even if she fails there she has another chance in Asian Olympic qualifying tournament in China in March 2016.

A mother to three children and still going strong! A true inspiration.

Mary said that the competition had increased quite a bit recently and also the number of weight categories had been reduced from five to three in the women's section. She can no longer participate in the 48kg weight category in which she feels the most comfortable. Amruta asked her about her training routine - she works intensely for one and half hour in the morning and the same amount of time in the evenings. After such strenuous work outs it is important to take rest and that is what she does in the remaining hours of the day.

Mary's interest in speaking to us increased after Amruta told her about her father, Sunil Mokal, (center) who was a national level boxing player and also a trainer in Tata Motors for 25 years. In the above picture you can see him practicing with Pune's best boxer Anthony, as two time Olympian Mr.Bose (left) looks on. After his retirement he currently teaches boxing and fitness to young kids without any fees.

What was a dull morning and lazy morning going to the UK embassy turned out to be one of the most exciting days of my life. For sports players like me and Amruta just seeing Mary made our day. Talking to her was a cherry on the cake! As chess players let us hope that after retiring from professional boxing, Mary thinks about pursuing the sport of Chess Boxing! While we could teach her survival tricks in chess, in boxing she would be truly invincible!

The ultimate brain+brawn sport = chessboxing

Chess boxing as a sport is gaining momentum in India. The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the #1 thinking sport and the #1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors – both mentally and physically. In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on.

A contest consists of 11 rounds, 6 rounds of chess, 5 rounds of boxing. A round of chess takes 4 minutes. Each competitor has 12 minutes on the chess timer.

A round of boxing takes 3 minutes. Between the rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear. The contest is decided by: checkmate (chess round), exceeding the time limit (chess round), retirement of an opponent (chess or boxing round), KO (boxing round), or referee decision (boxing round). For more information check out the website of chess boxing organization of India.

Boxers preparing with chess players is not such a rare phenomenon. In the above picture you can see the Vladimir Kramnik (left) at a training session with WBA heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko. You can read about this unique camp in the ChessBase article.

On a parting note, I would like to mention that great sports players like Mary Kom should not have to waste time going to the UK embassy to get their visas done. She is a national pride and her time could be much better utilized in working on her game and fitness than getting her biometrics done. In any case, I am not the one who should be complaining, because if it were not for this rule, I would have never met the greatest Indian boxer! 

Mary Kom's official website

Mary Kom's official Facebook page