Topalov v Kramnik - the rematch

Posted on February 3, 2008 by Nicholas Gruen
Posted in Sport-general

As you can see from the video above, there was no love lost between probable chess cheat Veselin Topalov and his nemisis in a recent world championship battle, Vladimir Kramnik. Anyway, though in previous comps Topalov looks like he's managed to pick up the odd surreptitious signal from his team I presume he did it all on his own against Kramnik this time - with the help of a pre-prepared speculative piece sacrifice. Not unusually for a Topalov game, the ordinary laws of chess (or of what makes a good move) seem to be suspended for a surprisingly long period of time, shortly after which it was all over. Is Topalov better than Kramnik? Well I guess on his day he is. Anyway, I wonder how much of modern chess involves players of roughly similar abilities trying to ambush each other with unusual moves like this one - so that one player has spend a few months studying a very sharp position with immediate tactical possibilities checked out by Fritz and other silicon enhanced brains, with trainers adding to the computers' armoury as the player tries to understand the positional possibilities after the initial tactical flurry. It's a remarkable game - play it through with full commentary here.

3 Comments

  1. Nicholas Gruen
    February 3, 2008

    I won't add a postscript to the post because it will muck up the embedded YouTube video, but, if you read the commentary you'll see that it turns out that Kramnik was keeping the move up his sleeve for 3 years (though it had been played once before) and that his 'engines' - computers - said that black was better after the sacrifice. But then engines are notoriously good at defending difficult positions. Less so humangoes.

  2. Nicholas Gruen
    February 3, 2008

    And (HT Brother David), Congratulations to Junta Ikeda for winning the Australian Open Junior Championship. For some reason ACT chess is doing very well winning three out of twelve titles. Emma Guo of the ACT who won the under 16 girls lightning this year also won a title last year (from memory) as well as being the only person to survive the Chess Kids nationals primary schools national championships - that's boys and girls - last year with 7-0!

    Junta also won the lightning and rapid championships.

    I've only played through one of his games, but this one provides a good sample of his complex and aggressive style.

  3. The Doctor
    February 3, 2008

    Junta's one tough nut to crack. Regularly gets into what most people would call time-trouble against extremely strong players - and still wins in very complex tactical positions. While the commentary on Topalov-Kramnik game talks about King's Gambit positions, there is a well known line of the Two Knights Defence - Cochrane's Gambit which also sacs a Knight on f7.