Effortless Andreikin against the Bogo Indian
When you combine the words 'best', 'young' and 'international' with a chess tournament, you know what to expect. One of the most celebrated chess tournaments for the youth, the World Junior Chess Championship, recently concluded in Chotowa, Poland. The top seeds Dmitry Andreikin and Anna Muzychuk lived up to their expectations and took the gold medal in the boy's and the girl's events respectively. Anna dominated the girl's section with 9 wins and 2 draws in the the first 11 rounds, but had a minor setback in the 12th round when she lost against the young Peruvian Grandmaster, Cori Tello Deysi. Interestingly, Cori had defeated last year's champion Soumya Swaminathan in a similar fashion when Soumya was leading the pack by one whole point. Beating the champion twice in a row in a tense penultimate round is some talent we cannot ignore for long. We will watch out for Cori in the future junior events, remember she is only 17!
Things were different in the boys section, Dmitry Andreikin started off to a very solid start and he maintained it through out the tournament. He was followed closely by other strong players in the tournament, but he kept his cool and managed to win the critical games to take first place with a superior tie break over the fellow Russian Grandmaster, Sjugirov Sanan, who also finished with 10 points.
Today we will take a look at one the games from the Champion against a Bulgarian International Master Kirill Stupak. This game is also a good example to emphasize the importance of openings. If you get stuck in them, you are doomed!
The first thing that strikes one's mind after seeing this miniature is where did black really go wrong? Other than taking on c4 a little early, black did not commit any serious error. Once Andreikin played his pawn to d5, there was really no stopping him from then on. Even though the computers keep increasing the evaluation by a few fractions of a point after some moves, in my opinion it is impossible to defend against strong players in such middle game positions.
One of the most satisfying things to accomplish in Chess is to outplay your opponent and when that opponent of yours happens to be a 2500 rated player, it just gets better.
