Bobby Fischer’s Death and Corus 2008 Update

So the last couple weeks I’ve been a little bit too busy to update my Blog, and I couldn’t have picked a worse 2 weeks to be busy since there has been so much action!

Fischer died last week the day I was heading down to the Liberty Bell Open in Philadelphia (Report Coming Soon). Before I left I had seen some Fischer comment on ICC about his death, but I figured it was just the random Fischer Fans spewing on about Fischer. It wasn’t until I got down to David Vigorito’s apartment in Massachusetts that I actually realized he had died.

Fischer’s death is definitely a tragedy. He did a lot for chess and the United States. Many players today wouldn’t be playing chess if it wasn’t for him, since he made it popular (or maybe I should say “more popular) in the USA. It’s too bad he didn’t continue playing chess after he became World Champion, as I’m sure we missed out on a lot of great games.

There has been lots of action at Corus the past couple of weeks. Magnus Carlsen is having what seems like a breakthrough tournament. Although the last couple days he has been playing some shaky chess. He was super lucky against Van Wely a couple of days ago in a position where the computer was saying Van Wely was +7 and in 2 time pressure moves Magnus was +4! Today he played some shaky chess today, but did it against the wrong person, World Chamipon Vishy Anand. Anand didn’t allow any of this cheap stuff and converted quite easily.

The big story of the tournament has been Cheparinov’s refusal to shake Short’s hand. In my opinion this is just really bad sportsmanship/gamesmanship, and after this event Cheparinov should never be invited back to Corus. I was really happy that Short kicked his ass when they replayed the game, as Chessbase wrote “There is a god, and he is not Bulgarian!”

The fact that Topalov and Kramnik didn’t shake hands makes a lot more sense to me. They have a bitter rivalry and have specific reasons not to shake each others hands. If you have some specific beef with someone it makes sense to refuse a handshake. But just because Short wrote something in some newspaper or blog that Cheparinov didn’t agree with is a really stupid reason.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Chessvibes.com has some awesome videos of post mortems and interviews from Corus. I highly suggest Aronian’s post mortem in his game against Radjabov, as it is highly instructive. You can see all of chessvibes.com videos on youtube here.