Kamsky blunders and loses fifth game

In a slightly worse position that was probably tenable, Gata Kamsky blundered horribly today dropping a healthy pawn. He then decided to try his luck in a queen endgame two pawns down, but the American had to resign at move 51. In the Challenger's Match in Sofia, Veselin Topalov now leads 3-2.

The Kamsky-Topalov World Championship Semi-Final Match takes place February 16th to 28th in the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria. The Challenger’s Match consists of eight games and possible tie-breaks and has a prize find of US $250,000 which will be shared equally by the players. The winner qualifies for a World Championship Match against Viswanathan Anand.

Game 5 To the surprise of many chess fans and journalists, Topalov played with the white pieces today, and not Kamsky. Even after the fifth game had finished, match regulations on the official website still quoted the rule:

"The colors shall be reversed after game 4. (The player getting the white color in game 1 shall play game 5 with the black color)."

This idea was borrowed from the Anand-Kramnik match of last year, the idea being that there wouldn't be just one player profiting from a White game after a rest day.

However, during the negotiations that took place in November in Dresden, this idea was abandonded for being too complicated for such a short match, and so an amendment to the rules had been signed by all parties prior to the match, but this hadn't (and still hasn't) made it to the official website.

A funny consequence of all this was that online commentator Sergey Shipov, who always annotates the game live in Russian at Crestbook, had mixed up the names of the players and was discussing reasons for Topalov to chose the French, and recognizing the style of Sutovsky in Kamsky's handling of that opening! ;-)

Unfortunately there's not much more to say about the game than what you've already read in the intro. Just when the worst was over for Kamsky, he blundered a pawn and then he had to make a choice between two evils: continuing with a pawn down in a hopelessly passive position or going for a queen ending with two pawns down. He chose the latter, but this was clearly lost too, as was shown by Topalov, who finished the game off accurately.

A huge setback for the Kamsky team, who again have to deal with the situation of being one down. But on the positive side, they have two Whites to work on against just one left for the Topalov team.

Name	Nat.	Rtg	G01 17/2	G02 18/2	G03 20/2	G04 21/2	G05 23/2	G06 24/2	G07 26/2	G08 27/2	Score
Kamsky	USA	2725	¬?	0	¬?	1	0				2
Topalov	BUL	2796	¬?	1	¬?	0	1				3

Photos © Ivan Stoimenov - courtesy of the official website

Links:

• More background info
• Report of game 1
• Report of game 2
• Report of game 3
• Report of game 4
• Official website
• Games in PGN
• Chess.FM blog
• Chess Life Online with Ian Rogers blogging