THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
June 29, 2004, Tuesday
Adams advances
By Malcolm Pein
MICHAEL Adams will play Vladimir Akopian of Armenia in the
quarter-finals of the Fide Knockout Championships in Tripoli. Adams
drew easily with white against the 16-year-old American Hikaru
Nakamura, who did not try too hard to reverse his defeat in the first
game, and Adams went through 1.5-0.5.
Akopian eliminated Michal Krasenkow, who sacrificed a pawn unsoundly
for no apparent reason and lost a long endgame. Akopian was the
losing Fide finalist in 1999 after beating Adams in the semi-finals,
and since then the pair had played only two short draws until Adams
won nicely in Moscow earlier this month.
All the players leading 1-0 from the first game went through. Top
seed Veselin Topalov won 2-0 against Zdenko Kozul, and Rustam
Kazimdzhanov ended Hungarian interest in the competition by winning
2-0 over Zoltan Almasi.
Four matches went to play-offs. Former Soviet champion and WCC
candidate Alexander Belyavsky took Alexander Grischuk to the blitz
games, but lost with black and could not extract sufficient advantage
with white. The match between Liever Dieter Nisipeanu and Andrei
Kharlov went to blitz after the Rapid Chess ended a win apiece, but
after two more draws they needed the Armageddon game. Nisipeanu had
white plus six minutes to his opponent’s five, but needed to win and
could not quite manage it.
The match between Pavel Smirnov and Teimour Radjabov was another epic
encounter that saw the Russian save an utterly lost position in the
first blitz game, only to lose the match by walking into Radjabov’s
favourite line of the Sicilian, which he honed at Linares this year.
After 22 moves of theory, Smirnov made a couple of errors and had to
resign in an anti-climactic end to a fine contest.
The world number one Garry Kasparov, interviewed on the ChessBase
website, has declared his predictions for the semi-finals to be
Veselin Topalov v Alexander Grischuk, and Michael Adams v either
Alexey Dreev or Teimour Radjabov. Thus far his predictions have been
spot-on. Kasparov has to play the winner of the Tripoli tournament
for the Fide title.
BLACK’s attempts to complicate in a “must win” game appear to be
yielding results, but a crushing tactical blow 33.Qxf6+!! ends the
game.
R. Kasimdzhanov – Z. Almasi
FIDE KO Tripoli (4.2)
Sicilian Paulsen
1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 e6 3 d4 cxd4 4 Nxd4 a6 5 Bd3 g6 6 c4 Bg7 7 Ne2 Nc6 8
Nbc3 Nge7 9 0-0 0-0 10 Bg5 h6 11 Be3 d5 12 cxd5 exd5 13 Bc5 Re8 14
Qb3 d4 15 Nd5 Nxd5 16 exd5 Ne5 17 Bxd4 b5 18 Rad1 Bb7 19 Be4 Qd6 20
Ng3 Rad8 21 Bc3 h5 22 Rfe1 h4 23 Nf1 Nc4 24 Bxg7 Kxg7 25 Nd2 Nxd2 26
Qc3+ Qf6 27 Qxd2 Rxe4 28 Rxe4 Rxd5 29 Rd4 Rg5 30 Rf4 Rxg2+ 31 Kf1 Qg5
32 Qd4+ f6 33 Qxf6+!! Qxf6 34 Rd7+ Kh6 35 Rxf6 1-0