Round 3.1: five wins for White

The games (and especially the resuts) in the World Cup start to look like those of these days’ super tournaments. In meetings between players of about the same (high) level White doesn’t lose that often and in this first session of round 3, 11 times the game ended in a draw and 5 times it was White who won. Mamedyarov was defeated by Cheparinov and Adams, Kamsky, Jakovenko and Wang Yue also started with victories.

World Cup Round 3.1 Results

All World Cup games so far in PGN here. A selection of yesterday’s games:

In the meantime the tournament website has built up a nice collection of interviews. Some quotes:

Peter Svidler
“I’m really more concerned with my health, because I when I came here I was already ill and had to pass up the World Championship in blitz, which was a kind of tragedy for me as I was looking forward to it so much. But I knew that if I was going to play 19 games a day for two days I wouldn’t be able to come here.”

“As I’ve said it’s too early to judge, but the Chinese chess players look very impressive so far, both in quantity and quality. They are a sort of Chinese armada, so it seems that at the Olympiad we’ll be having hard times. They are all 20-something and still have loads of opportunities.”

Gregory Kaidanov
“It’s a fact that chess is getting younger and younger, which is a bit surprising to me and there was no such thing in the 70s, for example, when all the strongest players were 40-something. And I guess it’s not because the elder players give way, the reason is rather the loss of motivation. As I’ve said chess doesn’t bring enough money, besides people get interested in new things and finally retire from chess.”

“The life is changing constantly and I think these complaints are a tad irrelevant and pointless. We can no longer live like we used to and play in the World Championship for half a year. I’d like to participate in a “normalâ€? tournament though. Frankly speaking, I haven’t done a lot of preparation for the World Chess Cup – it would’ve been pointless considering the element of randomness. So when you come you know it’s only for a couple of games, maximum four and it’s actually quite unpleasant.”

Nigel Short
“What can I say? I’m really disappointed, but, you know, it’s been really a long time that I’ve been able to play well in the tournaments of this nature, almost 10 years. And I personally don’t like the mixing of disciplines. You have classical chess which is like running 10 000 meters and you have blitz, which is like running 100 meters and there’s also rapid chess, which is something in between. People looking from the outside may say it’s all the same, it’s all chess, and it’s like saying: “It’s all runningâ€?. But to go from one kind of chess to the other rapidly is very difficult, so it’s a question of being able to withstand the tension in games like this. I don’t think my opponent played very well in the classical games, he was worse in the first game when he was White and he was clearly worse in the second game when he was Black, but this is my own fault. This is like playing football: you can have a lot of possession of the ball, but of you don’t put the ball in the back of the net, it’s your own fault. So my opponent didn’t play great chess, but he played better chess than I did. So that’s why he got through and I didn’t.”