Gelfand-Carlsen: some analysis
Gelfand-Carlsen was played yesterday, 17th March 2013, a Sunday. Why do I mention this? Because we were out walking the dog, since it was a glorious day, and I had to sneak glances at the progress of the games with my Playchess app on my iPhone. Uphill, I am a fair bit faster than Jane (think hare and tortoise) and this gave me the chance to sneak glances. Hush, Jane mustn’t know.
Well, my first glance was after 25…Nf8, when I felt reasonably confident we were going to see an endgame crunch from Magnus: the N is far better than the bishop, which is just a bit more than a pawn; and I didn’t see what Boris saw, namely his way of creating his own passed pawn.
Later, I saw the position just before Magnus played Qc1: I had presumed Qd3, centrallising, controlling some white squares and in particular taking f3 under command. However, Houdini finds a fatal blow to my logic.
I have done some light annotation of the game in the attached file.
allanbeardsworth 