Sunday, October 09, 2005

Newspaper Columnists on the World Championship

I have previously posted about places you can get news and annotated games from the FIDE World Chess Championship tournament. Recently, several chess columnists in newspapers have added to that list, requiring an addition. Some of these may require a one-time registration.

Robert Byrne in the New York Times writes today about the Polgar-Anand game from the first round, where Polgar's unimpressive opening preparation allowed Anand to develop a winning queenside attack out of the Caro-Kann.

Both Lubomir Kavalek in the Washington Post and Jack Peters in the LA Times write about the Anand-Adams game, with Anands's startling innovation with 23.Qd2!? in the Zaitsev Variation of the Ruy Lopez / Spanish.

Malcolm Pein's Daily Telegraph column has been worth reading. Today's Sunday column offers significant annotations to Svidler-Leko from Round 3.

The Guardian now has probably the best set of chess columnists the world's newspapers have ever known, but the coverage of the championship on the site is somewhat limited. Jon Speelman's recent column on the first Topalov-Anand match-up (Topalov's only draw of the first half) was great. And I enjoy reading about Nigel Short's attempts to turn journalist Stepen Moss from a tyro to a good player in a series of lessons (best linked to from the main page under The Grandmaster and the Rookie).

Raymond Keene of the Times Online has posted games but with few or no notes. One wonders what the value of such a column is with the internet providing all the games and multiple sources of annotations.

A little bonus for those just discovering Topalov's games: Zdenko Krnic's prescient article earlier this year at Chess Cafe titled "Veselin Topalov: Bulgaria's Newest Sports Star" offers two very recent and well-annotated games from the Informant.

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