Tal Memorial 5: Anand adds to Gelfand’s woes

Vishy Anand bounced straight back from his loss to his 2008 World Championship challenger Vladimir Kramnik to beat his 2012 challenger Boris Gelfand. That model game – eloquently explained by Vishy afterwards – was a fourth successive loss for Boris, who faces Vladimir with Black next. Anish Giri remained the sole leader after crossing the halfway point in the 2016 Tal Memorial with a draw against 2nd place Ian Nepomniachtchi on a day of hard-fought but balanced games.

Tal Memorial Round 5 results (click a game to replay it with computer analysis)

Anand 1-0 Gelfand

In the Candidates Tournament earlier this year Vishy Anand again and again demonstrated his resilience by shrugging off losses with the black pieces to win the next day with White. Back in Moscow for the Tal Memorial, he pulled off the same trick in Round 5, in a game that went perfectly for him. Boris didn’t follow the Soviet wisdom of trying simply to stop the bleeding after three losses and went for the combative Rossolimo Sicilian (1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 g6). Vishy described the line they played as “all the rage”, with 6…Nh6 “just exploding”. 

If you want advice on how to meet that opening check out Robin van Kampen’s video series My White repertoire vs. the Sicilian: Part 1 - The Rossolimo.

Both players blitzed out their moves until the novelty 15.Ne4, with Vishy commenting “the whole thing is to get opposite-coloured bishops”. Boris saw and tried to prevent the plan, but in the kind of way that usually only happens in games from the era of Capablanca or before, Vishy managed to get exactly what he wanted. This is the position after 29.Be3

The white queenside pawns made Black’s light-squared bishop a bystander on a6, on b7 his own pawns do the same job, while White’s dark-squared bishop is a monster. It’s instructive that although Gelfand could now play 29…Rd3 and even take the pawn on c3, it brought him no joy whatsoever. The ultimate winning idea was beautifully simple:

37.Bxe3! fxe3 38.Kxe3. As Vishy noted, the f-pawn is likely to drop off, but by that point the queenside pawns will be unstoppable – which came to pass. Don’t miss Vishy’s lucid explanation of his play:

Impressive as that was, there was no hiding the fact that Boris Gelfand is in a tough place right now. Giri, who started Gelfand’s losing streak, commented, “he played too little tournaments lately, and it happens”. Indeed, in 2016 Boris has only played nine classical games in the Aeroflot Open in March, three games in the Italian Team Championship in April and six games against Ernesto Inarkiev in July – not a single one of those encounters was against a supertournament regular.

The problem with a supertournament is of course that you don’t get an easier opponent when you lose, and the sharks are circling… Boris missed the Olympiad, but he now faces the Russian Olympiad team (with Svidler replacing Karjakin or Grischuk) in the remaining rounds:

Is it time to aim for “one draw in a row”?

Elsewhere the players had no problem achieving draws, though none of them were anything less than hard-fought. Anish Giri had prepared a wrinkle on move 22 of the Grünfeld that condemned Ian Nepomniachtchi to a miserable defence, though neither in a Russian post-mortem with both players nor in an English post-mortem with just Anish was a clear winning idea discovered:

What was certain was that Giri had missed a trick when he allowed 32…Nc4:

He was upset to discover that his intended 33.Nd3 Nd2+ 34.Ke2 runs into 34…Nb3!, picking up the a-pawn. He switched to 33.Rd1 Ra4 34.b3 Rxb4 35.bxc4 Rxc4 36.Rxd6, but though he played on for another 31 moves he realised full well that his king and pawns weren’t placed correctly to have any real chance of winning the rook and pawn endgame.

Mamedyarov-Svidler also at least started as a Grünfeld, but with the rare 3.Bg5 (336 games compared to 231,440 with 3.Nc3 in our database), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov was already encouraging Peter Svidler to leave familiar waters, as he did with 3…Ne4. It was something Peter relished:

I think we were both happy there was 3…Ne4, because we both prefer to play chess rather than to demonstrate long theoretical preparation!

It wasn’t entirely unchartered territory, though, since Mamedyarov had won an absolutely crushing game against none other than Fabiano Caruana in this line at the 2015 Baku World Cup (check out our report from back then).

Caruana had a fine position out of the opening, though Svidler claimed he hadn’t really looked at the game except for having been a spectator (he mated Topalov that day). Shak didn’t know that, though, and explained his reason for deviating with 9.e3, although he preferred his original move 9.e4: “I thought you were prepared and I wasn’t!”

Initially Mamedyarov was doing well, with a critical moment arising on move 14:

Peter had been planning 14…h6 here, but realised in time that after 15.Nxg6 he might be in real trouble. The white attack was menacing, but the 7-time Russian Champion found a neat way to return his wayward queen to the action: 14…bxc4! 15.Nxc4 Qa4! 16.b3 (without queens Black is of course much less likely to get mated) 16…Qe8 17.Rd1 Qf7. There might have been more for White there, but soon the momentum swung in Black’s favour, and it was eventually Svidler who regretted exchanging pieces on e6 and ending up in a drawn ending. 

Li Chao-Tomashevsky was another strategic struggle to savour, and from the way the Chinese player explained things afterwards you can envy the students in his chess school:

One amusing moment in that post-mortem:

Tomashevsky explained he played 20…a6, not 20…a5 here, since after the latter move, “there was the prospect of another 7-hour game!”

One player who seemingly has no qualms about playing 7-hour games despite his advancing years is Vladimir Kramnik, who also appears to be a glutton for punishment. Despite almost losing to Svidler and getting beaten by Nepomniachtchi, Kramnik continues to play his own pet Hedgehog system against 1.c4 in Moscow, which is becoming something like Karjakin’s “dubious Queen’s Indian” (Giri) that always seemed to be on the point of collapse but eventually took him into a match against Carlsen.

Levon Aronian deviated from his predecessors on move 7, but after that a familiar pattern returned. Kramnik played g5 for the third black game in a row, gave himself holes on d5 and f5 by combining that with e5, and went on to lose a pawn:

Of course the drawing tendencies of such rook endings are great, but Levon summoned every trick he knew to try and force a win, until Kramnik was finally able to sacrifice his rook at a moment when the pawns were sufficient to ensure a draw:

It was Topalov-Aronian in the last round of the 2016 Sinquefield Cup, but with roles reversed, and you could see afterwards that Levon was gutted to have missed out.

The net result of Round 5 is that Anand has joined Li Chao in third place, while Giri still leads with four rounds to go.

Before Monday’s rest day, we have one more round, where apart from the aforementioned Kramnik-Gelfand, the games Nepomniachtchi-Mamedyarov and Aronian-Giri are likely to be critical to the outcome of the tournament. Tune in again from 14:00 CEST for live commentary in English, Russian and Spanish (the shows are available to rewatch on ChessCast's Livestream page). 

You can also follow the games in our free mobile apps:

See also:

• Official Tal Memorial website (in Russian)   
• Tal Memorial blitz games on chess24
• Tal Memorial classical games on chess24
• The Tal Memorial is back
• Spassky stars as Mamedyarov crushes Tal blitz
• Tal Memorial 1: Nepo wins on sad day for chess
• Tal Memorial 2: Anand & Giri turn on the style
• Tal Memorial 3: Nepo and Giri lead youth charge
• Tal Memorial 4: Giri turns on beast mode