World Cup 2007: Kamsky, Jakovenko, Alekseev Advance to the Quarterfinals

Kamsky continued to “Use The Force” today in his tiebreak match against Peter Svidler. The first game saw Kamsky play a line of the English as white which is not considered too threatening. Nevertheless he managed to get a nice advantage with the bishop pair, but Svidler played accurately and held the position. In the second game Kamsky played a line of the Steinitz Deferred which is rather dreary. I’ve played the white side of this line a couple of times against local New England Legend John Curdo. In my games against him, I always got a nice advantage since white is able to enter a king’s indian structure with the light squared bishops traded off, which definitely favors white. Nevertheless, in a position that looked pretty bad for Kamsky, he suddenly conjured up all kinds of activity and Svidler couldn’t handle the heat. Congrats to Gata!

In a surprising upset (atleast I think it is!) Dmitry Jakovenko knocked out Levon Aronian! If I had to bet on one player at the start of this thing, I would have put my money on Aronian. Thankfully, not too many websites take bets on chess. The game Jakovenko won was a little strange, he grabbed a pawn early in the game and just hung onto it for like 50 moves. Aronian seemed to get great counterplay for the pawn, but Jakovenko proved the saying that “A pawn is a pawn” and eventually converted it for a win.

Alekseev’s win over Bareev didn’t come as much of a surprise. Alekseev has been playing some awesome chess lately, and Bareev’s openings with black are somewhat shaky (Caro-Kann/French).

I’m gonna put my neck on the chopping block for the amusement of my readers, and make some predictions for next round matches, you guys can all laugh at me in a few days when I go 0/4!

Karjakin-Alekseev: Alekseev Wins
Jakovenko-Shirov: Shirov Wins
Ponomariov-Kamsky: Kamsky Wins
Carlsen-Cheparinov: Cheparinov Wins