How to learn from others part two
Other great chess event just finished in Moscow. To really gasp the situation from internet is not really possible. This time at least the commentary was in good level thanks to the editor of New in Chess Dirk Jan Geuzendam. Over the net however you may only catch the momentum of the match and the background is not visible. Ofcourse during such a event the personal commentary is not very wise to do and all commentators were very polite. Nobody did prematch analyzes in personal level and some did but only for the players. Now in postmortem I like to share some thoughts. Gelfand the hard working chess professional versus Indian superplayer.
I always remember when Shabalov was explaining why he never became top 10 player in the World. He was lucky to see how much work was done in daily bases by Vladimir Kramnik and he realized it is not for him. I suspect that Gelfand works even harder. I played against Gelfand some games but I really understood him when I had the chance to review his book "My most memorable games". Then I found how he really works. He is not working in one line for a week or so, no it takes around 10 years. Of course this was well known fact for Anand and his team. As we see now after the match. Anand tried to avoid lines where the home factor is prevailing. It means the lines where you need to accumulate hours of hard work just to remember the lines. Gelfand played Grünfled and Sveshnikov, both openings require to remember hundreds of lines just to keep the game going. Anand did not try to examine Gelfand on this. Instead the match was decided in this line:
This last game wiht classical time control ended the match in tie. In rapid games Anand was the favourite and he won the match. I think that Gelfand did trust himself and this was the main factor of his defeat. Its easy to comment or critizise from distance but I hope we will see some inside commentary with game analyzes most likely in New in Chess in near future. In my previous post I was commenting the game Nakamura-Lenderman, at that time I did not know the curious ending of the game.
Next day Nakamura beat Kamsky with black pieces and convincingly won the US Championship. Lenderman agreed a draw in a winning position being underdog of the whole game, but this is life you grab your chance or you blow it. Good luck to everybody!
