Carlsen ready for Monaco
4 February 2007 13:35 PM | Last modified: 13:47
Magnus Carlsen seems ready for Monaco. In March the yearly rapid and blindfold tournament Melody Amber will take place there, and this weekend a Scandinavian group of four played a blindfold tournament as a preparation for Magnus, on the island of Funen, Denmark. His co-participants were the GM’s Peter Heine Nielsen and Emanuel Berg and the strong IM Steffen Pedersen. Carlsen won the mini tournament by beating his own second Heine Nielsen in the final.
The Faaborg Midt Cup tournament was played in the beautiful castle Hvedholm, closeby FÃ¥borg on the island Funen. After Seeland, Funen is the biggest island of Denmark and it’s also called the Garden of Denmark. Hans Christan Andersen is one of the more famous Danish born on Funen.
The Hvedholm Castle was built in the 15th centrury. Till 1919 it was private property of different families but because of huge taxes that were put up that year by the government, the owners had to sell it. Now it functions as a hotel.
Friday and Saturday a double round-robin was played. Unfortunately there were the obligatory huge blunders here and there, as always with blindfold chess, but there were also some interesting games to watch.
Carlsen-Heine Nielsen (photo: Svend Novrup)
Berg-Pedersen (photo: Svend Novrup)
Today the finals for the 1st and 3rd place were played. Emanuel Berg beat Steffen Pedersen 1,5-0,5 and the final was won by Carlsen, who defeated Peter Heine Nielsen twice. In the first game Heine Nielsen had blundered a piece somewhere and also in the second one he was the weaker of the two when it came to calculation:
35 moves blind!! Those guys could most probably play blind against me and still win!!!!
This boy is a supertalent, no doubt about that! He is a man for the future, he was a bit unlucky in the Corus tournament, but he is only 16 yet, and I’m sure he will be a top 10 player soon!
Top 10 he will be, but I think it’s atleast a couple of years away.
Awesome Carlsen! he´s not just a genious, he´s a gorgeous boy ^^ and he´s coming to my city!!! in the linares morelia tournament!
You should try playing blindfold Nas - it’s actually not very hard to do, I find. I don’t think my (admittedly severely sub-Carlsen) standard drops much with a blindfold on.
Agreed. Blindfold chess is not that hard to do if you have the capacity to visualize the position. Of course the problem is that you must know the board by heart (especially important is which square is which color).
Of course Carlsen will beat youb blindfolded, Nas. lets face it: he will beat us al in a blind simul a piece down!
Staring at laptops… I guess they use it to enter & record the moves. But it does not look like they are playing blindly, they might as well we playing via ICC. Why not blindfold the players, or let them stare at an empty wall…
They stare at laptops just to concentrate and enter their moves and wait to see opponent’s moves in algebraic notation..Laptop may have only an empty board if there is any at all.