The Navara Fanclub

One of the most remarkable participants in the Corus Chess tournament was the Czech top talent David Navara. Navara (22, rating 2719) is a special boy. Extremely modest, polite, apologizing all the time, he makes an unworldly as well as a heart-warming impression, enhanced by his monotonous manner of speaking and his habit of looking at the floor while he talks. In the pressroom people soon started calling him ‘cutie’ and ‘honey’ - words normally reserved for certain player’s wifes, female journalists and press employees.

Navara, who is never casually dressed, is striking on the stage by the way he sits at the board - as far as possible removed from his opponents, never bent over the board, as if he really never wants to disturb them. He is also the only one to applaud when at the start of the round, the daily prize is awarded. He greets all his colleagues with a polite nod of the head, speaks to the press of ‘grandmaster Anand’ and is always prepared to explain a certain position. During post mortems he is sometimes silent for minutes, taking in the position, calculating variations, evaluating positions. He speaks his languages fluently, and even talks a little Dutch: “goedenmiddag [good afternoon].”

Navara may be a unique character in the chess world due to his appearance, at least as interesting and impressive are his chess games. During the Corus tournament all attention was mainly focused on the ‘big three’, Topalov, Kramnik and Anand. Of course this is understandable - but Navara was the only one to draw all three of them with Black!

He started the tournament excellently with draws against Aronian, Svidler and Kramnik and a victory over Carlsen. The he collapsed temporarily, losing to Radjabov, Van Wely, Karjakin and Shirov, but still drawing Topalov. By the time Navara started his final sprint - beating Ponomariov and a draw against Anand in the last round, the Chessvibes team was so impressed by the little Czech, that we already talked about an informal Navara fanclub. Navara is a player to watch constantly. He plays a quiet, positional sort of chess - the real deal, that is. This is especially clear from his draws against Kramnik and Anand and his victory over Ponomariov. To honour David Navara, below you find an analysis of his game again Kramnik, partly based on Russian notes of GM Landa and IM Notkin on the www.chesspro.ru site and on Sergei Shipov’s notes on www.crestbook.com.

>> open in a new window