4/27/15

Chess Legends Battle of St. Louis-Kasparov Wins-Got More?

Former world champion and chess legend Garry Kasparov defeated Nigel Short-a former winner of the candidates tournament and challenger for the world title against Kasparov over the weekend in a series of great chess matches that were very instructive to casual chess players. In the rapid and blitz brief games even highly skilled GMs make mistakes that bring their play closer to something recognizable and useful to club chess players.

With rapid fire games the great GMs exhibit ensembles of game choices and responses without so much calculating thought going into each position that causes so many contemporary games against top rated GMs to be draws with highly technical unexciting end games. Kasparov is probably the best attacking player since Mikhail Tal (Fischer would have been more like Carlsen if he wasn't so far ahead of his time), and it is good to see him break through Short defenses and crash through his offenses in a style that club players might learn from. One would like to see many more such legends matches with one to one players competing for a $100,000 prize over ten games.

There are many that would like to see Kasparov-Nakamura, or Anand-So, Kramnik-Topolov, Karjakin-Kasparov etc. in unrated Legends format matches. Even present world champ Magnus Carlsen might be interesting to watch in eight blitz chess matches and two rapid with more opportunities to blunder. Realistically though people are watching to see if Carlsen can become the first player to reach a 3000 rating, and who will make the candidates tournament for the right to challenge Carlsen for the world championship in November 2016.




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