Recent Events: My Favorite Game from the World Team Championship 2013

The World Team Championship recently concluded in Turkey and featured alot of fighting chess and a surprisingly rare victory for Russia (http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12466/735/). The US team finished fourth, with a strong performance from Varuzhan Akobian who won the individual gold medal as the top reserve player. My favorite game of the tournament was his seventh round victory against GM David Baramidze from Germany. The game is a bit of a brawl with both sides having the advantage at different points. While it is probably a bit too muddy to be considered a "masterpiece" (whatever that means), I personally enjoyed it all the more for it's complications and stumbles.

I have annotated the game below in quite a bit of depth, and I hope that you enjoy the many beautiful moves and ideas in both the main game and the variations as much as I did. For those of you who would like to tackle some of the key positions as puzzles, I included these as separate diagrams after the annotated game. I very much encourage you to play through the full game afterward though as there are many beautiful and rich ideas in the game that are not suited to puzzle form 

Happy holidays!

Annotated Game: Baramidze - Akobian

Puzzle 1: Hard 

Puzzle 2: Medium

Puzzle 3: Easy