Screening the tournaments in different levels
There are a lot of tournaments going on around the World. Recently I got my eye on the supertournament in Norway and the Americas Continental Championship in Medellin Columbia.
The elite or supertournaments have the same participants over and over again. The qualification to these tournaments are only by invitation. The tournaments are very boring. The Italian game is the most popular opening. I even do not try any more to understand the subtlities of these opening positions. In Norway the biggest sensation was that the reigning World Champion did not win the tournament. Instead Aronian won. Bid deal, next time some other player, if not Magnus, is going to win. Nobody particular suprized me. Still Kramnik did. He is and was famous of his sense of danger. Somehow after winning excellent game against Magnus he immediately lost equal endgame to Maxime Lagrave in the very next round. Still these two games were interesting battles and were commentated everywhere were not equal to what happened in his last round game against Giri. I cannot recall such a defeat in 20 moves in such high level tournament. Giri did not lose in some sharp Sicilian line, but he was carried away in the some modest opening shceme. Kramnik has some poisoness ideas time to time, but still how the player with rocket high rating can manage to lose in 20 moves?
The other tournament I was following was the American Continental Championship in Medellin. My good friend Alexander Shabalov was among the participants. He unfortunately had very mediocre tournament. The youngsters are coming and taking over. Especially Jorge Cori from Peru. He is definitely already a good material for supertournaments. He only needs to raise his ELO rating to over 2750, but even this might be not enough. The rating is one criteria, but he of course has his chances to win the next World Cup in Georgia this September. He has not only chess talent, but also knows how to shake of the balance his opponents. In the following position in dry endgame positon which certainly is a draw he stroke with unexpected b4 and his opponent lost the drawish endgame.
The winner of the tournament by tie-break was 16 years old Sam Sevian from United States. He had some successes recently, but I do not like his too academic style of play. This worked perfectly in Continental Championship, but we need to consider that it was one of the strongest in recent years, but the level of chess in American Continent is not comparable to Eureopean or Asian chess. It is unchanged at least for last 30 years when I was around. Some stars are evolving time to time, but in general the overall level of play is not very high.
Summer is in full swing and many chess tournaments are ahead. I hope to see and cover some of the interesting moments soon.
Jaan Ehlvest