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Corus Diaries 2008 - The Caruana Kid by Dr. Albert Alberts Chessville is pleased to present notes
and games from Corus by the noted author
CORUS 2008 Wijk aan Zee, The Netherlands. The party is over. The white demonstration tent can be dismantled and the five or six black horses can return to the large vacant green meadow in the centre of the village. As far as I know Wijk aan Zee is the only beach village in the western hemisphere without ugly tourist exploitation. And NO parking meters!! Back to business as usual.
Special guests can be granted lodging in the pyramid glass penthouse on top of the hotel with a view over the sand dunes on the sometimes rough North Sea. You can write books up there and I think it has been done. Carlsen and Aronian on top. Computers say that Magnus missed a continuation to a good advantage and the tournament victory, while Judith Polgar (mrs.? but playing under her world famous maiden name) managed to draw a Ruy Lopez Marshall gambit. The blackies played 4-5 of those in the final round. Marshall's western chess invention by now is about 100 years old, a multitude of lines have been analyzed up to move 30, and in my view it is the most convincing proof so far that the noble game is a draw by nature if both players play the best move every step of the way. We are still left with the question why computers play better then humans. In particular in a tournament setting with head calculation in limited time. Knowing that Kasparov and Kramnik went under, amateurs can forget about it. The solution has to come from free style- advanced-man-assisted-machine chess or correspondence chess, which by now is all the same thing because it is hard to believe that correspondence players in their private attics and shacks (and villas, e.g. world champion millionaire Van Oosterom) do not resort to machine assistance. Backed up by computers any amateur can play over Elo 2700, the theory is all in there, the endgames are exactly solved. It just is not fair. A complete chess library without royalties for the inventors for 50 eu or $. Somebody is suffering. Like the advent of the Hammond organ in movie theatres that put violinists out of business in the 1930s. One does not need tournament books, no comments from professionals, the machines make the proceedings crystal clear. Numerical rating says it all, over +2 (Fritz/Rybka/Junior, what have we, it makes no difference) the advantage for White is overwhelming, with -2 for Black. The critical risk margin reaches up +3 resp. -3, which is considerably higher then the one operative in tournament games, usually fluctuating within +1 and -1. Re-raising the risk a couple of times will ultimately drive HAL (the chess computer in Kubrick's Space Odysseia) crazy and bring about its collapse.
In my view the open Sicilian (Najdorf, Svesnikov, Dragon, Keres Attack, Sozin-Fischer, a.o.) is the prominent battlefield in computer chess due to the hideous asymmetry of the pawn structure. And the best answer for Black on 1.e4, in particular with the e5-Svesnikov variation which in tournaments now is avoided via the older Rossolimo-line with White going Bb5. The paradigm of Robert James Fischer. Various examples can be retrieved from the literature in
which very strong players get lost in the Sicilian jungle before move 20.
Classics are Ratmir Little Warrior Cholmov-Keres, Cholmov-Bronstein and
Tisdall-Lee all to be found on
www.howtofool.fritz.com. 100 best chess moves ever collected by
Tim Krabbe and computer analyzed by the Fritz Slasher on that site. Before I vanish in the night with a computer study of Karpov-Kasparov match games (two aliens playing chess taking the game to extreme limits) I collect a couple of open CORUS Sicilians. First from the CARUANA KID (Italian-US double passport I believe) whose overwhelming win in GC-C is highly likely to promote him to GC-A next year. We already highlighted Caruana-Carlsson in round 7, a Black-e5 Sicilian (hunting game is the Dutch term) responded with Nb3/f4. Ruigrok avoided the open Sicilian against Caruana and lost in round 3. Now we go Najdorf: Caruana- van der Wiel, the latter a Sicilian expert par excellence
And although in this case Nijboer has to be credited for an intriguing novelty, we study: Nijboer-Caruana
Great game with theoretical value. See you next year! - Albert Alberts
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Feel
free to apply for a job as a kitchen aid in hotel Sonnevanck, the kitchen
closes as 10 pm and if you can play piano you can sit down behind the
restored black Bluethner grand 80 years old, a magnificent instrument and
entertain the guests. If you are finished with the pots and pans at
that time that is, which is a tough job, I can assure you.
Best
game I saw so far in that style on CORUS? Carlsen-Anand, an open
Sicilian, and with Anand I am still not convinced that somewhere the Carlsen
plan going Qh4!? b3!? Rc1/c3!?, Bg2!? Rh3 Bf3!? sacrificing two pieces in
the finale never mind the two pawns on White's queen side can not succeed.
A string of daring non-computer risk moves. A work of art.
