There is hope for us all

I am presently watching round 11 of the Tata Wijk aan Zee tournament: taking advantage of the snow in Manchester, to come home early and watch the latter stages of this round.

Risk is defined as ‘blogging about the endgame before Karsten Müller has explained everything’ but here goes. I am staggered that Vishy Anand only drew his game against Hou Yifan from here:

Vishy was playing fast. Two pairs of rooks had just come off, and he has played Kd8-e7-e6. These last moves were obvious, and would have been played ‘by hand’ by most players: improve the king.

I was assuming Kd5, further improving it, noting that Nf3 is impossible because of the e4+ fork. If Ng6, then e4+ making progress: or, in practice, I might have (after Ng6) moved by king back, and played h5 or f5 first- maybe one of these pawn moves is better than 1…Kd5 in fact. Either way, play slowly, leave the knights on for the moment, and push white back.

No, very quickly, Vishy played Nf5, knights were exchanged, 3.a4 Ke6 4 g4! and Yifan drew- still to my surprise, since I had assumed Vishy had calculated everything before swapping into the pawn endgame.

Full credit to Yifan: the pawn ending looked better for black, and when playing the world champion, there must be a tendency to think it is all over. But by playing b4 and a4, and then not pushing b5 until black had played e4, the pawn race is a dead heat, and if black tries too hard, he could easily lose.

A blow to Vishy: with two games left to play this weekend, I suspect this will take the wind out of him, and he will be disappointed that a tournament

which could have been great, and a return to form, may well end as just being good.

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