What's going on in Dortmund, we wonder
This year's Sparkassen Chess Meeting continues to disappoint the chess fans as two out of three games in round 6 (Kramnik-Leko and Bacrot-Naiditsch) were quick and uneventful draws. Jakovenko-Carlsen, also drawn, was quite an interesting fight, in which the tournament leader was under a bit of pressure.
The Sparkassen Chess Meeting takes place July 2-12 in Dortmund, Germany. Carlsen (2772), Jakovenko (2760), Kramnik (2759), Leko (2756), Bacrot (2721) and Naiditsch (2697) play a double round-robin.
Round 6
We cannot hide it anymore under polite objectivity: the ChessVibes editorial team unanimously agrees that Dortmund 2009 is... just boring. Yet again, two out of three games were encounters between elite grandmasters who had no intention at all to go for a real fight, or so it seems. This time we can't even blame the heat so perhaps we should consider it bad luck that two duos of friends who worked together, Bacrot/Naiditsch and Leko/Kramnik, were paired against each other in the same rounds...Let's just focus on the scuffle between Jakovenko and Carlsen, the only real game. At first it seemed to be following the same path, as many main line Sveshnikovs end in a draw these days. However this time White did gain a slight advantage, actually without doing anything special. For a while it was quite exciting to watch how Black would defend against White basic Bd3 & Qe4-h7 mating idea, but as soon as this plan was effectively met, also in this game there was nothing left to fight for. Four more rounds to go, and Carlsen still leads by half a point. Four more draws is probably enough to win the tournament.
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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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