Biel Off Day, Danzhou Super GM Blog Coverage
Good Saturday to you all! Today marks an off day for Biel, and this gives me a chance to highlight a few other events that are taking place in our chess community. Any event that features Magnus Carlsen and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov is going to suck up most of the action, but there are many other events contributing to our shared experience of the fine art!
Today marked the first round of the British Championships (the 105th incarnation of this tournament!) with a decent lineup - presumably Nigel Short is missing the tournament so he can continue his politicking for the FIDE presidency (my own two cents - FIDE needs a complete fresh start, but Short worries me - does he have the correct attitude and demeanor for leadership?), but it still features a strong lineup including Michael Adams, David Howell, Gawain Jones, and Luke McShane (as a brief aside, Luke McShane is one of the great "What If?"s of the past 30 years - he had the talent to be well within the fight for the world summit, but the siren song of respectable employment drew him away from Caissa's grip). Michael Adams will be fighting for his 6th British Championship (surprising he hasn't won more!), while David Howell will be competing in the hopes of his 4th (pretty good for such a young pup!).
The main alternative tournament of note, however, is the Danzhou Super GM tournament which is being held in the Chinese city of Danzhou (yeah, makes sense). One of the major phenomena in the chess world since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a reallocation of power from the Slavic countries to China - seemingly out of nowhere, a whole group of super GMs sprouted from China to challenge Cyrillic supremacy! There's a great deal of nonsense is said in a psychologizing manner about styles in chess - however, I think it's fair to say that Chinese players (and the "Chinese school", if one can even murmur about such a thing) have a unique style. Their praxis in the past ten years featured a revival of openings like the Petroff and the Schlecter Slav, and their collective aggregate of play seems to feature much more concrete and tactical play than other players. Top flight chess seems poised to only feature more Chinese (and Indian!) players - this tournament features three of China's top players (Yangyi Yu, Wei Yi, Xiangzhi Bu - Bu was one of the very first Chinese super GMs to make his mark in super tournaments in the past 15 years), but also mixes in young super GMs from around the world. Sam Shankland, America's freshly minted 2700, looks to continue his incredibly strong 2018, and Jan Krzysztof-Duda looks to continue his excellent run that was sparked by winning the Polish Championship. Vladimir Fedoseev is notable for his absurdly aggressive chess (I mean absurd in a good way - he's an absolute thrill to watch!), while Quang Liem Le and Santosh Vidit round out an absurdly young and talented field where not a soul is under 2700.
The first two rounds, unfortunately for spectators, have started out with very cagey and cautious chess. I'll be analysing Vidit-Duda from the 1st round - this sole decisive result from the 1st round featured a lovely positional sacrifice from the Polish super GM for two incredibly strong passed pawns and an absolute hammerlock on the position. The 2nd round featured one decisive result as well, but this game of Yangyi Yu-Xiangzhi Bu featured extensive maneuvering in a long and tortuous endgame where Bu slowly wore Yu down. Hopefully we see some more interesting chess by the next Biel rest day - in the meantime, we'll take a look at Vidit-Duda, and we'll see you tomorrow for Biel!
http://view.chessbase.com/cbreader/2018/7/28/Game333542078.html