Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival 2013 Monday 21 January - Thursday 31 January 2013 MASTERS ROUND 10 (FINAL): 2 FEBUARY 2013 NIKITA NUDGES OUT NIGEL John Saunders reports: Nikita Vitiugov, from St Petersburg in Russia, won the Tradewise Gibraltar Masters title at the Caleta Hotel on Thursday after a pulsating play-off final against three times winner and reigning Masters champion Nigel Short of England. Four players – the above two, plus Maxime Vachier-Lagrave of France and Chanda Sandipan of India – tied for first place on 8/10, necessitating a knock-out play-off to decide the winner of the £20,000 first prize. The play-off consisted of two rapidplay semi-finals, played at the rate of 15 minutes plus ten seconds a move, with Short beating Vachier-Lagrave and Vitiugov beating Sandipan over two games. The semi-finals were one- way traffic for the most part but the final match between Vitiugov and Short was a thriller. The Russian, who was to turn 26 four days after the tournament, showed amazing coolness under pressure as he played out most of a 104-move game with only seconds available for each move, before finding a clever tactical trick to finish the game. In the second game Vitugov kept his opponent at bay for a draw which clinched the match 1½- ½. Rapidplay is best enjoyed in real time. Of course, the games were recorded via electronic boards and filmed on video cameras and can be played through later like a classical game, but nothing beats watching them at the time. In fact, the online spectator gets the best deal. I was lucky to be at the ringside but unlucky to be short of stature so struggled to see over the taller people in the room. No matter: my laptop was only a few metres away in the press room so, after taking a few pictures, I nipped back to my desk and watched the games there whilst listening to Simon Williams and Irina Krush commentating as the moves came thick and fast. “IT’S A GAME OF FOOTBALL OUT THERE” Game one of the rapidplay final was truly amazing. If you didn’t see it as it happened, bad luck... but all is not lost: you can still sample some of the excitement by watching the video commentary which is still available at the official website. You can gauge the tension from Simon Williams’s reactions. Simon doesn’t pretend to be unbiased: he’s an Englishman so he was unashamedly rooting for his fellow countryman, but in a comical and self-deprecating way. The words “Come on, Nigel!” are never far from his lips. I particularly loved it when Simon told us “it’s like a football match here” – a refreshing change from football commentators who make foolish analogies between their petulant ball-kicking, injury-simulating nonsense of a sport and our vastly superior game. Game one started by veering slightly in favour of Short, playing the black side of a Nimzo-Indian Defence, and Vitiugov started using up significantly more time. The English GMs in the commentary room felt Vitiugov was drifting, and cheered when Short played ...g5 but a few moves later Vitiugov’s queen drifted across to a3 and the audience groaned as they realised Short was losing a pawn to a trick. “This has gone White’s way,” admitted Simon, but he soon recovered himself and was intoning his perennial “come on, Nigel” mantra. Vitiugov went out on a limb with his clock and his queen. It was remarkable brinkmanship, going three minutes down on the clock and putting his queen out of play but somehow he held it together, won a pawn and established a stable advantage. FRANTIC FINISH It wasn’t over yet as Short managed to mix things up as his opponent’s time ran down to just the ten-second increment with a queen and minor piece endgame on the board. Vitiugov was reduced to boosting his time allowance with queen checks and twofold repetitions. Was there a threefold repetition in there? The answer later transpired to be ‘yes’. It occurred after White’s (and indeed Black’s) 69th, 71st and 73rd moves. I was following intently but I confess I didn’t spot these during the game. But Nigel did – watch the video and you can see him looking round meaningfully at the arbiter and quietly uttering the word ‘draw’ as Vitiugov played Qh5+ check for the first time and he replied Ke7. THE ICEMAN COMETH But nothing happened. Vitiugov played a 74th move and Nigel replied. The moment had passed. (We’ll return to this further down.) Vitiugov played on, often with only his ten-second increment, and eventually won the game. Not to mention a new fan: by the end commentator Simon Williams was lauding Vitiugov’s amazing endgame technique and coolness under pressure. Simon was fair-minded and gave credit where credit was due, dubbing the St Petersburg grandmaster “the Iceman” – a very apt nickname. Gibraltar Masters Play-Off Final, Game 1 Vitiugov - Short Black to Play This position arose after an astonishing 102 moves, with both players eventually reduced to only 10-15 seconds for each move. Short, playing Black, had missed a clear drawing chance the move before (101...Ke7- e8! instead of 101...Ke7-d6?) and here he might have prolonged the game and, with a bit of luck, saved it had he played 102...Bxh3 103 Qxh3 Qe1+, etc, but instead he made it easy for White with 102...Be4. White replied 103 f5+, discovering a check against the black king and shielding the h-pawn from an attack on the h7 square. There followed 103...Kc6 104 Qc3+, covering the h8 square, whereupon Black resigned since he can no longer prevent the advance of the h-pawn to queen in two more moves. _____________________________________________________________________________ TO THREE OR NOT TO THREE – THAT IS THE QUESTION What of those threefold repetitions? Nobody seems absolutely certain how the law stands. Simon and Irina can be heard on the video remarking that Short couldn’t claim a threefold repetition at a rapidplay time control. Nigel himself came into the press room after game one of the final and asked me whether he could have claimed. Slightly flustered that I had been put on the spot (I have no arbiting qualification), I had to admit that I wasn’t sure about the rule and told him that I hadn’t personally spotted a repetition (I now know I was wrong on the latter point). Could Nigel have claimed? A little while later a qualified arbiter who was not officiating in that capacity at the congress told me he saw no reason why Short shouldn’t have pressed a claim, though I’m not entirely sure I understand under which law. The rules for quickplay finish have provision for a draw claim in the case of someone making no effort to win by normal means, but this was not a quickplay finish – it was quickplay from the start. Law nine, governing draws, talks in terms of players writing draw claims on score sheets – inapplicable in the circumstances of a rapidplay game. In this respect the rules have failed to keep up with the times and don’t meet the requirements of high-profile competitions. This game was played with highly sophisticated technology being deployed to record the moves via the board and video cameras – and, of course, had a large sum of money riding on it, not to mention a vast watching audience online, with the reasonable expectation of having a game that would not be interrupted by player claims or arbiter interventions. As they say in tennis, “play must be continuous” and if chess is ever to attract a TV audience, it needs to strive for the same thing. In these circumstances there are three interested parties: the two players and the audience. The audience wants to see a game played in accordance with the normal rules of chess (as far as possible), with no interruptions. The players probably want much the same thing, plus the certainty of knowing when a game is drawn or not without having to think about when to claim, or rely on the speed of vision or chessplaying ability of an arbiter. The non-applicability of the normal threefold repetition rule in electronically recorded rapidplay chess seems positively prehistoric. Without it, a player can seemingly go on repeating (and gaining ten-second bonuses) as long as they feel like it, or at least until an arbiter feels constrained to step in... and do what, exactly? As things stand, it is not clear (a) how many times a player can repeat until the opponent can claim he is making no effort; (b) on what basis the arbiter makes a ruling; and (c) whether any existing law of chess is applicable at all. Perhaps the most ludicrous thing of all is that the technology to solve the problem has been around for years, and is used in online chess. Software already exists on chess servers to identify a threefold repetition and offer a player the option to claim a draw. It would surely only be a simple matter to adapt this software and make it available on a watching official’s computer so that the computer can flag instantly when a threefold repetition has occurred (or indeed 50 moves without pawn move or capture elapsed). A law for a blitz or rapidplay game played with suitable technology could then be introduced to allow an arbiter to declare the game a draw at the point when the repetition occurs.