On the first day of the World Cup's semi-finals Boris Gelfand delivered a big blow to his 22 years younger opponent Sergey Karjakin. The Israeli grandmaster continued his fantastic World Cup tournament with a win with the black pieces today, and only needs a draw with White tomorrow to reach the final. The game Ponomariov-Malakhov ended in a draw.

The FIDE World Chess Cup takes place November 20th-December 15th inn Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. It's a seven-round knockout with six rounds of matches comprising two games per round. The final seventh round consists of four games.

The time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game with an addition of 30 seconds per move from move one. Games start at 15:00h local time (11:00 CET).

Round 6, day 1

Boris Gelfand is playing very, very strongly in Khanty-Mansiysk. The ease with which he set aside Dimitry Jakovenko yesterday in the tiebreaks of the quarter-finals was impressive, and today he came with an excellent follow-up: a win with the black pieces against Sergey Karjakin.

Already on move 11 Gelfand sacrificed a piece, but accepting it would be too dangerous:

11...Ra6!?
Now 12.Bxd5 Qxd5 13.Rxe7 Rg6 14.g4 f5 and White is playing with fire. However, just a few moves later Black got his attack anyway, thanks to a strong pawn sac.

18.Bxd6? cxd6! 19.Qxd4 Qg5 and Black's attack was so strong that Karjakin could only avoid mate by giving back three pawns, which of course was too much.

Where many other GMs failed as well in the earlier rounds of this World Cup, Ponomariov couldn't get anything tangible either against Malakhov's Chebanenko Slav. White's endgame advantage was only a theoretical one as it was impossible to profit from Black's isolated pawns on the kingside.

All photos by Galina Popova | courtesy of FIDE

Tomorrow at 11:00 CET is the second and last classical game of the semi-finals and again we'll have live commentary. (You can still replay GM Sipke Ernst's annotations on the live page until the new round starts.) We're covering the World Cup and the London Chess Classic for free; starting from 2010 our live commentary will be subscription-based. You'll find more info here.

Games round 6, day 1

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Links

• Official website
• Games in PGN