Wednesday 19 June 2013

Entirely home prep?

When I see a game like the one below, I often wonder how much home preparation is involved. Played in the latest round of the Tal Memorial, Vladimir Kramnik gives up a rook but in return generates enough threats against the White king to force a repetition. My database has the players following theory up until 13.f4, and Stockfish quickly spits out 13. ... h5 as the best reply. Therefore I would not be surprised if Kramnik  had looked at this line in the past and found enough fantastic moves to render it playable.
(NB As I types this game in, the Caruana-Kramnik post game press conference was taking place. If I spoke Russion I may have been able to shed more light on the ratio of inspiration to perspiration, but I guess I will wait until tomorrow to find out what really happened)


Caruana,Fabiano - Kramnik,Vladimir [C67]
Tal Memorial Moscow, 19.06.2013


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I see at the Ukraine championship there was a 210 move game that ended in a win for black. A record? There were many moves of painful and pointless manouvering... Anyone else see it?
AO

Anonymous said...

The answer was: I looked at this 3 years ago. Did not remember much during the game, but knew that black should be OK.