Six losses and one draw for Topalov so far. notbad.jpg

the way Magnus is outplaying Karjakin is very impressive

my jinx touch is working

These commentators (Dirk Jan & Agdestein) are pretty boring :/

The old 5-way tie at +3 eh.

Round 1 is complete and here are the results.

Carlsen-Topalov draw
Anand-Aronian draw
Nakamura-Wang 1-0
Svidler-Hammer 1-0
Karjakin-Radjabov 1-0

Topalov appears to still be in good form and isn't letting yesterday's 0.5/9 performance in the blitz tournament affect him.

Radjabov's descent is showing no signs of stopping.

review of round 1 by IM chessexplained

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unxyu...ure=youtu.be&a

Just noticed Carlsen-Anand today. Should be fun

I can see Anand playing the Scandinavian or some other offbeat opening that would be part of his normal prep

for how great the norway chess page is set up, the commentators are brutal. i would rather listen to some 2000 club players give analysis using an engine than these guys boringly ramble on

i think agdestein said that empirical evidence suggests that the knight pair is as good as the bishop pair. something like this.

did you hear it? was yesterday

Karjakin wins again to go to 3/3; he looks like he has ideas of running away with this thing! Radjabov was able to use the advantage of having the white pieces against Hammer as a "slump-buster" of sorts, and finally wins a game. Nakamura has seemed to struggle greatly against Carlsen over the last couple years (though I haven't used a database to verify that my gut feeling is statistically accurate), so I'll call his draw today a nice result, even if it was with the white pieces. Vienna FTD! Topalov CONTINUED to demonstrate fortunes that are a perfect reversal of Radjabov's as he dropped his game against Anand today (not that there's any shame in losing when Anand has white against you). The win brings Anand to 2/3, which ties him for second with Aronian who played Svidler to a rather uneventful draw.

This has been your round three recap, brought to you by BobJoeJim. We now join your regularly scheduled forums, already in progress.

Are replays of the live stream available? I love watching the post-mortem analysis between the players.

Very interesting. The queen, rook, bishop and pawn are ranked in line with the maximum number of squares they can potentially attack or move toward at one time. Ranking the Bishop slightly ahead of the Knight makes sense in this regard. Is it the Knight's "leaping ability" that gives it that much extra value?

I'm fairly certain that this isn't true--I want to say that Kaufman did a lot of empirical work in this regard, and found value in the bishop pair.

This isn't some abstract science. There's even a material combination filter you can use in chessbase completely trivializing all empiric measurements. That said I think the result would be more or less meaningless since there's a million other factors that determine when which setup would be preferable. The result in a vacuum is analogous to figuring out what first letter of the last name has the best overall performance - if only Carlsen were Karlsen. You'll definitely get some data but it'd be completely meaningless.

Kaufman did in fact conclude that a lone bishop and lone knight are equally valuable, but bishops are overall more valuable than knights because of the value held by the bishop pair. This, and many many other details from his empirical study can be found here:

http://en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4007775

so if i were to change my name to bobby kasparov, i should be a god of chess, right?

No, you'd get crushed by Garry Fischer, because you misevaluated the relative value of first and last names.

****.

karjakin GOAT???

[x] Black against a 2813
[x] Ain't no thang
[ ] Strongest tournament field ever, imo

Or so says Sergei.

1.5 point lead after 4 rounds. Ridiculous.

that was some epic stutter in the interview! is Karjakin known for this?

Looking at the color-coded evaluations on ChessBomb for moves 33-40 in Hammer-Wang, I kind of feel bad for the engine. Nothing against the players, of course, time trouble is a part of chess, but poor Houdini must have been rolling over in its digital grave as it watched the evaluation swing by 4 or more points on nearly every move.