Thursday, November 13, 2014

Carlsen-Anand World Championship 2014 Game 4

Analysis by IM Sagar Shah



My write up on facebook for game 4.


Post by Sagar Shah.


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Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Carlsen- Anand World Championship 2014 Game 3

Analysis by IM Sagar Shah









































My write up on the Game 3 on facebook


Post by Sagar Shah.




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Monday, November 10, 2014

Carlsen-Anand World Championship 2014 Game 2

Analysis by IM Sagar Shah



Some of the tweets that I liked for the game two:



















My write up on game two on facebook


Post by Sagar Shah.


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Sunday, November 9, 2014

Carlsen-Anand World Championship Game No.1

Analysis of Game No.1 by IM Sagar Shah

This analysis is mainly done for the World Championship official app. If you have an android device be sure to download the app from here

Here are some of the interesting tweets and comments from Game no. 1 that I found:
















And this is what I wrote about game one on Facebook:


Post by Sagar Shah.







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Saturday, November 8, 2014

Magical Opening Ceremony and Press Conference of Carlsen-Anand 2014

The match between Carlsen and Anand begins today at 15.00 hours. And Anand will have the White pieces.

This is what Magnus Carlsen had to say about it.

As you all would remember, in the 2013 match it was Carlsen who had the White pieces in the first game and began with 1.Nf3. What will be Vishy’s first move today is the question on everyone’s mind but before that let’s transport ourselves to Radisson Blu Resort and Spa where the press conference and the Opening Ceremony of the match were held.


As always the charismatic World Champion drew towards him loads of reporters


On the other hand Anand was seen quite relaxed talking to his wife Aruna

In the press conference, Anand was asked an interesting question by a journalist:  Your charming wife accompanies you to every tournament. Is she a talisman or your inspiration?
Anand in excellent spirits replied with a smile, " Well, she is kind of wife! Obviosuly we are close. She has been accompanying me to tournaments ever since we got married. Recently our son was born and she doesn't come more often now!"
And when Magnus was asked about his Talisman or inspiration, he simply shrugged off the question saying that he was not such a spiritual person!
The million dollar question asked at the Press Conference was who were the ‘seconds’ of both the players. There was a silence for a few seconds as both players waited for the other one to speak. But finally Anand revealed his. And apart from the old ones, there was a new addition.


On the right we have the usual suspects: Radoslaw Wojtaszek and Krishnan Sasikiran. But the big surprise was the man on left: Grzegorz Gajewski. He is a country mate of Wojtaszek (Poland) and he has an Elo of 2643.

As for Magnus he revealed his seconds in the following manner: “There is the Dane and there is the Hammer.” The Russian translator was so confused that she refrained from translating this sentence. But of course what Magnus meant were these two guys.


The Dane is Peter Heine Nielsen and the Hammer is Jon Ludvig Hammer!


The Stylish G-star Raw model

Carlsen was asked at the Press Conference whether he thought himself as the favourite for the match. He put a question back to the reporter in typical Carlsen fashion asking, “What do you think?!”


FIDE President Kirsan Illyumzhinov was the one who began with a welcome speech at the press conference. He also welcomed the guests at the Opening ceremony.


Also present on the dais for the press conference were former world champion Anatoly Karpov and Ilya Merenzon organizer from Agon

The Opening Ceremony followed the Press Conference. It was so less elaborate than the opening ceremony held at Chennai in 2013.


The Masters of Ceremony were former World Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk and People’s Artist of Russia S.Makovetsky

 The Masters of Ceremony spoke in Russian but their words were translated on the live stream into English. That was a very thoughtful gesture on the part of the organizers.
As they rightly said, for the next three weeks the experts and amateurs of the world will be mesmerized by the duel of the two best grandmasters of today! They are not just very different players but very also different personalities which makes their battle really intriguing.


Igor Levitin who is the assistant to the President of Russian Federation read out the words sent by Vladimir Putin


Deputy Minister for the sport of Russian Federation Pavel Kolobkov


President of Russian Chess Federation Andrey Filatov with Pavel Kolobkov


The great Boris Spassky was there


Antoaneta Stefanova also graced the occasion


The Russian women’s team that had won the gold medal at Tromso 2014 was honoured by the Russian government. From upper left in clockwise: Kosteniuk, Pogonina, Olga Girya and Rublevsky who was the coach of the team


Some spectacular dances were on show…


 Performed by elegant and beautiful dancers


The two players with chief arbiter Andrzej Fillipowicz for the drawing of colours


Magnus drew the black colour and hence the black pieces in game one


 For lovers of the game, chess seems like magic and hence they were joined by a professional magician. The magician has the white balloon of Vishy Anand in his hand.


And from the balloon erupts out of nowhere a white pigeon! Vishy Anand looks extremely impressed


From Magnus’s balloon out comes a grey bird


Tina Kuznetsova who was the finalist of the TV show Golos mesmerized the audience with her singing


The opening ceremony ended with the performance of famous Russian Jazz artist Igor Burtman with his quartet
The first game begins tomorrow at 15.00 hrs local time in Sochi and Anand will have the White pieces. What will be his first move? Your guess is as good as mine!

THE OPENING CEREMONY

THE PRESS CONFERENCE



Pictures from the official website.
This article has been originally published on ChessBase website.
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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The most comfortable way to follow the Carlsen-Anand match

If a poll were to be carried out in the world with the following question:
"Your house is on fire. What is the one thing that you will definitely try to save?"

I think almost 50% of the people would say "Mobile Phone". The point I am trying to make here is that cell phones have become such an integral part of our lives, that a day without it is simply unimaginable.
Yet, if you see chess players they are usually working all the time on their laptops or computers. Are the mobile phones completely useless to them? I don't think so. I feel the answer lies in the fact that there are so very few good mobile applications available out there. But there is one man who has decided to change that.

Asim Periera: single handedly churning out some awesome mobile applications

A look at Asim's facebook cover photo reveals this:


These are all the amazing apps that Asim has made in the past. Of particular note is the last one with an orange knight called the Follow Chess app. You can view all the live games and latest tournaments on that app. And I am in excellent company when it comes to Follow Chess app lovers!

You know this man is doing a great job when he is give a compliment by none other than the great Vishy Anand. You can download the Follow Chess app from here.

So when Asim says that he has come up with an application for the World Championship match 2014 between Carlsen vs Anand, you must definitely pay attention to it.

The app is made by NexM, a company that Asim has created.

That is the logo of the app

In the description, it is mentioned that this is the official app of the FIDE World Championship 2014.

Ok let's dive into the app to see what are its features.

1. Follow Live Games


Just imagine, this scenario, you are in a classroom and the teacher is boring the life out of you. All you can think of is the World Championship match (if you are reading this blog so carefully, you have to be a chess lover! ) . You ask your friend via whatsapp to send you a screenshot of the position. First of all he has to be online, even if he is, you have to download the picture he has sent you! So many hassles! If you have this app: as soon as a move is made in Sochi, it will be updated on your mobile device. And there are two engines (critter and stockfish) installed in this app to help you analyze. You only need to download another small app called "Analyze This" which is totally free to use this function.

2. Instant Notifications


Sometimes these guys (Anand and Carlsen) indulge in a long think. For eg. in the 9th game of the 2013 match, Anand thought for nearly an hour for one move. How do you know that a move has been made? This has been taken care of! There are three options in the settings:
1. Notify me when the game is about to start
2. Notify me when the moves are made
3. Notify me when the the game ends

As you can see, these notifications will come with a small logo on top of your smart phone which means that either of Anand or Carlsen has just pressed the clock! :)


3. Live updates on Home Screen


Convenience can have no limits and the app takes it to the next level. Suppose you do not always want to go to the app to see if a move is made, you can use the app widget and drag the board to your home screen where you can see the moves being updated without having to press any buttons! Super thinking!

4. Tactics by IM Swayams Mishra


The first part was about how to follow the match. But the app doesn't restrict itself to just broadcasting the moves. It also has training material. There are 32 tactical positions, carefully selected by my good friend and also a strong chess player IM Swayams Mishra. The cool thing about these puzzles is that if you think Nde5 is the correct move in the above position (which is the correct move!) then the next move Bxg4 is automatically played. So it is a training much like a real game where the opponent is making the moves. After you have solved the problem entirely, the complete annotations can be seen.

 The creator of the tactical positions: Swayams Mishra. At a rating of 2491 his credentials cannot be doubted!

5. Previous games annotated by IM Sagar Shah


My favourite part of the app! :) Here you will find 37 previous encounters of Vishy Anand vs Magnus Carlsen deeply annotated. Out them 24 have been annotated by me. I particularly like the 10 annotated games of the last World Championship match which have been analyzed in great depth. This feature gives you a lot of material to work with and it goes without saying that after seeing so many games of Carlsen and Anand you will be in a better position to gauge the styles of these two players.

6. Integrated Twitter account


This is a feature I really like. All you need to have is a twitter account. You enter your username and password and the app instantly syncs your device with all the tweets all around the world that has #CarlsenAnand in it! It's simply amazing! There are so many people tweeting, you can really get the inside news! Not to mention you yourself can start tweeting effortlessly! :)

2014 Match games annotated
And Lastly, All the games that have been played will be analysed by the author of these lines and you will get the analysis before the next game begins!

It will not be an easy task but I am up for it! :)

Just in case you were wondering whether this app will take away a lot of your phone's battery, you might want to read this:
The app only does its work when the server notifies it that a move has been made, instead of continuously connecting to the server every few minutes. This saves lot of device battery and you can always keep your data connection ON.

The credentials of Asim Periera cannot be questioned. He had made the 2013 World Championship official app which was extremely well received having nearly 1,20,000 downloads. This year with all his experience, he has just created a much more beautiful app.

You know who Asim Periera is supporting in this match!

The only drawback I can find is that it is not available on any other platform apart from Android.

The match between Carlsen and Anand is going to be a complete chess extravaganza which you just cannot afford to miss.

I am sure you don't want to see the match like this!

And creating an infrastructure like this may not be so easy!

Download the app and see the match comfortably! :)

I am sorry if the last three images disturbed you, I was just trying to make a point! :)

You can download the app from here.
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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Half knowledge is dangerous!

I have this habit of buying one chess book in every tournament that I play. In this way, my final aim is one day to open a huge library of chess books! And there are some tournaments when I really play well. Then I can use my prize money to buy more chess books. 
In my Euro trip which ended just a month ago, I had two huge achievements.
1. I became an International Master (IM) in Spain
2. I won the Dresden Open 2014 and made my maiden GM norm in Germany.

In one of my past articles on this blog: People behind my IM title , I had mentioned that there are two chess authors whom I hold in very high regard.

One of them is GM Jacob Aagaard

And the other is IM Mark Dvoretsky.

When I became an IM in Spain, my wife, Amruta, decided to gift me the latest book written by Aagaard.

The fifth book from the Grandmaster Preparation series: Endgame play.

The book was pretty expensive. 30 Euros. That comes to nearly Rs.2400. So I had kind of exhausted my resources on book buying for the trip.

But then something amazing happened.

I won the Dresden Open 2014 and was richer by €2000
That meant I had quite some money to buy a few new books and I decided to buy one of Mark Dvoretsky books.

In German the title of the book read: Paying attention to opponent's possibilities. Though the book was in German, it was mainly a workbook. And had a lot of training positions. So I figured that language won't be much of a hindrance.

After coming back from the two and a half month Euro-trip I took some rest and when I was back to the chess board, I decided to work with these two books.
Usually what I do is to solve one page from each book every day. On 24th September when I sat down to solve, these were the positions in front of me.

Six positions from Dvoretsky's book

And four from Aagaard's.

A little note about how I solve. I set the time on my clock (lets say around 45 minutes for the all the problems) and then I setup the positions on the chess board, solve them and write down the answer. After finishing the Dvoretsky problems, I would check the answers and then repeat the same process with Aagaard's positions. Bear in mind, I try to solve these positions very seriously as if it were a real game. Hence, whatever I have written below is when I was working with my maximum capacity and not as a leisure activity.

One of the positions from Dvoretsky's book that I would like to bring to your attention is the following:

It's White to play. What should he do?

In the game White immediately erred with the move 1.Kd1? Kf2 2.g3 Kg2 3.Ke2 and now all would be fine if Black took the h2 pawn as then Kf2 is a draw. We will come to that in the main-line. But black has the crushing, 3...h4! 

Game over folks!


and after 4.gh4 f4! the fact that the white king is on e2 spells his doom as the f-pawn moves ahead with a check.

As you all must have understood by now, it was important not to commit your king's position. White must start with 1.g3! And after Kf2 2.Kd3 (or Kd2) Kg2 3.Ke3! 

It is important for the White king to use the e3 square.

Now h4 is pointless as after gh4, there is no f4. Hence Black must play 3...Kxh2 and after 4.Kf2 we reach a theoretical draw. 

This is a position with mutual zugzwang. If it were White to move he would lose as Kf3 would be met with the outflanking manoeuvre Kg1! But here it is Black to move and wherever he goes, the white king just follows him. For eg. Kh1 is met with Kf1 and Kh3 with Kf3. 

With Black to play, there is absolutely no way to make progress. Keep this position in your mind!

I was well aware of all these intricacies and hence could solve this position quite easily and quickly. After solving all the other Dvoretsky problems, I opened Aagaard's book and had the following position in front of me.

White to play. How should he continue?

It's clear that White has to do something concrete. His g3-pawn is hanging and Ne4 is met with Nd4+ when the f3-pawn falls. Hence White must start with 1.Nxh5! Black has no option but to attack the white knight with 1...Kh6

White knight does not need to move yet. Taking it with the pawn hangs the f5 knight and Kxh5 is met with g4 Kxh4 gxf5 with a winning pawn endgame. So the most natural move in this position is definitely 2.Kf6!

Everything just works for White here. The knight is taboo. And white next threatens Nf4, winning the g6 pawn. It was at this point, I noticed the move 2...Nxh4

A curious position! Both the knights are hanging! In order to make progress White has to take the knight. 
3.gxh4 Kxh5 And now Kg7 would be met with Kh4 Kxg6 Kg3= with a draw. White must play 4.f4. Of course Kxh4 lose to Kxg6. But Black will go 4...Kh6 and we reach the following position.

As you already remember from the Dvoretsky position that we analyzed above, this is a theoretical draw.

I tried really hard to find a way for White to win. But there was absolutely none. Finally I went ahead, solved the next positions and then checked the answers.


In the solution section to the above position. Aagaard did not consider the move 2...Nxh4. Instead he gave 2...Nd4 3.Nf4 Nxf3 4.Nxg6 with a winning endgame. I was surprised. After all the variation that I considered with 2...Nxh4 was a draw. Why did Aagaard, who is usually quite meticulous about his analysis, did not consider the move at all.

I opened my laptop and set up the position. I clicked on the tab reference and checked that the position was correct and it had occurred in the game Voitsekhovsky-Karalkin, Tomsk 2006.
When the patient is gravely ill and no diagnosis are to be found, we have to finally resort to doctor Houdini. And when I reached the below position which I considered a draw and switched on Houdini, the result was shocking.

Houdini claimed an advantage of +- 10. something for White!

I was 100% sure that the Dvoretsky position was a draw. But I guess you already have figured it out what is the difference over here. For those who haven't here is it.


In the Dvoretsky position the stronger side's king is on the edge and hence he cannot win. Where as in the Aagaard position, the stronger side's king is near the center and all that he has to do is simply sacrifice his h-pawn and make a queen with Ke7 Kg7 (Kh7 is met with Kf7) and h5! and the f-pawn queens. In short, the position of the kings have been interchanged.

I tried to think a lot as to why exactly did I make this mistake. It would have been highly improbable that I would have made such an error in the Aagaard position if I hadn't seen the Dvoretsky position a few minutes before. When I saw the Dvoretsky position I simply said to myself that the kings keep moving up and down for eg. Kh2 Kf2 Kh1 Kf1 and so an and nothing happens. I didn't really pay attention to the positioning of the kings.
When I saw the Aagaard's position, I made the similar test. Kf7 is met with Kh7 Kf8 with Kh8 and I can do nothing about it. Hence in my mind, I took both the positions as same, as they passed the test filter that I had created.

Of course you can just argue that I was careless, but I want to assure you that I wasn't. I was solving very seriously and at my full strength. 
It was a big eye-opener for me and I learnt a lot from this mistake.
My advice to all the players would be: In chess it is useful to have patterns in your head. Drawn setups, fortresses, ideas etc. But when you do assign a specific position to your memory be sure to check all its aspects. Because if you do not do that and just vaguely remember things, there is a high chance that someone out there will fool you pretty soon! :)

Dont be a fool! Study chess carefully!


Addendum: This article became quite popular within hours of me writing it and was published in a Spanish blog.
And on monday 29th September, Jacob Aagaard published it on his Quality Chess blog. I think this for me is a huge honour and a seal of approval that my work is of a decent quality! :)
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