U.S. Chess Player Narrowly Misses Playing for World Championship

Russian chess star Sergey Karjakin took the candidate’s Tournament victory after check mating Fabiano Caruana in the final round. Caruana -an American sometimes Italian, needed the win to play for the world championship in November. He seemed to lack the aggression needed to whump Karjakin rather than vice versa.

At the super-GM plus 2700 rating of contemporary chess draws are usual the majority of the time. Style and position tend to be first rather than clever classical Mikhail Tal-like check mates. Karjakin in an earlier match against Veselin Topolov had a similar classical-looking sacrifice and straightforward checkmate as he had against Caruana. Those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it in chess as well as politics.

Caruana had unlearned aggressive, sacking chess so far as to fail to methodically advance his A pawn along with the B and sack them in order to enfilade Karjakin’s king position that should have been a naked singularity shorn of defenders making a Caruana check mate possible. Instead Caruana allowed to many moves to pass without removing the king’s proximal defenders and letting Karjakin have time and tempo sufficient to breaking down Caruana’s advancing pawns. When did Tal advance his pawns in the center in order to lead a checkmating attack?

A fair and balanced approach does work for positional and clever victories for Super GMs of course. Yet the direct crash and thrash checkmate wrecking a king’s defenders is also useful to remember. Karjakin seems to remember that lesson a little better than Caruana.

In two years Caruana will  be older and wiser in chess and perhaps better prepared to win the Candidate’s tournament against some very skilled chess players including perhaps the rising Chinese chess star Wei Yi who just narrowly missed qualifying at the 2015 World Cup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GDViK2w2wY the Karjakin-Caruana struggle

Fischer once said; ‘sack, sack and mate’ in describing how to win against a particular chess defense; the Sicilian dragon. i.e.. Robert James Fischer vs Fridrik Olafsson (1961). Caruana too needed to find a way to obliterate the kings defenses on the a,b & c files.