Creative Nisipeanu loses to Gelfand in Bazna
Our readers know very well that Romania's number one Nisipeanu is a very creative player. Yesterday at the King's Tournament in Bazna he sacrificed a knight and got a strong attack against Gelfand, but then went wrong and eventually lost. Shirov-Ivanchuk and Kamsky-Radjabov were drawn.
The 3rd King's Tournament, a six-player round-robin with Radjabov, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Gelfand, Kamsky and Nisipeaniu, takes place June 14-25 in Bazna, Romania.
Round 2
Already after the second playing day we can state that the King's Tournament can't really go wrong as far as the attractiveness of the games is concerned. Besides five big names from the top 20 there's also the highly creative number 55 in the world, Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, to which Michael devoted a lengthy article full of great games, two months ago. Yesterday Nisipeanu was doing it again: with Black against Gelfand he went for the King's Indian - not the private property of Radjabov in Bazna! We'll not dive into all the details of the Bayonet Attack but 20.Na4 was the first new move.After the opening a typical KID middlegame chaos appeared on the board where 21...Nxe4 - a knight sacrifice with the rook on a8 also hanging - deserves two exclamation marks. It was also praised by Gelfand after the game. The Israeli grandmaster reacted well and it was Nisipeanu who went wrong with 26...Qxa8. GM Rogozenko analyzes here and gives two alternatives: a) 26...Nh3+ 27.Rxh3! Bxd1 28.Rxd1 Qc8! 29.Rc1 Qxa8 30.Bxd6 Rf4 is unclear; b) 26...Nxg2! 27.Rxf8+ Bxf8 28.Qf1 Nf4 29.Ra2 Qg5 30.Kh1 Qg6 "with excellent compensation for the exchange". Alexei Shirov also sacrificed a knight against Ivanchuk but in this game White was counting on winning it back soon. Although his knight sac was spectacular, after the game Shirov had to admit he missed that the planned 17.Bg5 fails to 17...f6 18.exf6 gxf6 19.Bxf6 Bg7! 20.Bxg7 Qxg7+ with check. Therefore he had to go for an ending that was slightly better for Black, which he defended very well. Radjabov went for another Dragon in his Black game against Kamsky, who decided to go for a quiet variation with castling kingside. With 22.g4! the American secured a small advantage as his bishop was clearly stronger than its counterpart, but with some accurate moves Radjabov held the draw.
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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