A thing of beauty

Looking at Anand's win over Wesley So in round 5 of the Gashimov Memorial, the term 'a thing of beauty' immediately sprang to mind. Not wishing to repeat subject headings for this blog, I did a search to see if I had used this expression before. It turns out I have not used it as a subject heading before, but I did use it in a couple of posts, including a previous game by Anand. That was his win over Aronian in 2013, which I remarked upon in a column titled A Game for the Ages.
This game is equally as nice, with So being caught by some opening preparation, and a clever piece sacrifice. I am not sure how much Anand saw after he played 14.f4! but the whole attack seemed to just flow. While So was able to hold off the worst of it, he still ended up in a losing ending, which Anand had no trouble winning.


Anand,Viswanathan (2791) - So,Wesley (2788) [C84]
Vugar Gashimov Mem 2015 Shamkir AZE (5.2), 21.04.2015