Ding Wins Lev’s King is Dead
Today, has been a fascinating day for watching chess, with both the Alekhine Memorial and Grand Prix tournaments being held. It is great to be able to watch games live- my preference being on Playchess.
Several games are still going on. As I write, Mickey Adams is beating Vishy Anand, or so the kibitzers, armed with Tablebases and engines are saying: though to me, the practical difficulties for Mickey seem high: I am reliving the tension of captaining the England team, hoping for my players.
Would I be confident of winning this against Anand? With 18 min? With 18 hours? As I write this, Mickey has played Re2, but the kibitzers say Re3 with the idea of Re2 was best. We shall see.
Meanwhile, Leko, with 1 min on his clock for two moves, has just missed a pretty stalemate.
1…Rg1+ 2 Kf5 Rg5+! 3 Kg5 stalemate; instead, he played Rh1 but should still draw.
Ding Liren has though beaten Lev Aronian, and the finish was stylish.
Here, 1 Bg7+ is almost an only move: it was clear to me that it was at least a draw, so was a pseudo sacrifice, but Ding showed me how it is in fact won.
Only when Ding played Qh6 did it become clear to me: at the time, I was looking at Rh6, which loses, but Ding playing rapidly played Qh6 before I had time to look at it. A very nice game, which I have added light notes to in the attached file.
Meanwhile, Kramnik has just won a nice, typical Kramnik-style, game versus Vitiugov, and Vishy has resigned against Mickey. A good day's chess.
(The title is a play on the distasteful ding dong the witch is dead which has been a meme with Mrs Thatcher's death: I hope my usage is not in bad taste).
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allanbeardsworth 