4 Americans Bite the Dust in World Cup 2007

This was not a very good day for Americans at the World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. GMs Alexander Shabalov, Alexander Ivanov, Sergey Kudrin, and Julio Becerra were all eliminated. The biggest surprise to me was Shabalov’s loss, since he is the current US Champ and was playing “down” against GM Dusko Pavasovic of Slovenia. These 2 game mini matches are tough though since one slip up and it’s basically over.. Still these GMs all take home $6,000 which is not shabby for 2 days of work.

GM Gata Kamsky was the only American to make it through today, he won his match convincingly over
Ahmed Adly of Egypt. The game he played was quite instructive in the c6 English, white’s bishop on g2 became basically useless because it was hitting the d5 pawn and all of black’s pieces infiltrated on the queenside.. I like this plan of Na6 and Qb6, I usually put the knight on d7 without thinking in this system, so it’s a nice plan to add to my arsenal.

Tomorrow we will see 4 Americans fight for their life in the tie breaks. The live coverage of this tournament must be really early in the morning since whenever I wake up and log onto ICC the games are all finished!

This is my first post using “Adobe Contribute”, which I just downloaded from adobe.com with a 30 day trial.. If any of you see anything weird about this blog post let me know so I can fix it. It was such a hassle to log in to the Wordpress to do a post so I’m really hoping this works out.