2012 TRADEWISE GIBRALTAR CHESS FESTIVAL
Monday 23 January – Thursday 2 February 2012

PRESS RELEASE 27 – 3 February 2012

Round 10 Report by John Saunders

GM NIGEL SHORT (ENG) WINS TRADEWISE 2012
Hou Yifan Breakthrough Gibraltar 2012

The 10th Tradewise Gibraltar Festival ended yesterday at the Caleta Hotel with England’s Nigel Short winning the tournament for a record third time after tying for first with tournament sensation Hou Yifan of China and then winning a pulsating rapidplay play-off by 1½-½. Short and Hou Yifan had finished on 8/10, with Michael Adams (England), Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan), Viktor Bologan (Moldova), Emil Sutovsky (Israel) tying for third place on 7½ points.

For winning, Nigel Short netted the £20,000 first prize and also the £5,000 special prize (set up in honour of HM Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee) for the best placed Commonwealth competitor. 17-year-old Hou Yifan takes home £12,000 for finishing second plus the £10,000 women’s prize and the £600 Junior prize. The four players in the next score group shared £26,500 equally.

Nigel Short loves playing in Gibraltar and this is his third success on the Rock. He tied for first place in the inaugural event in 2003 and took clear first place the following year. Last year he scored a phenomenal 8½/10 – half a point more than this year – and easily good enough for first most years, but it wasn’t even good enough to tie for first as Vasily Ivanchuk, playing at his stratospheric best, scored an amazing 9/10. So this year’s success made up for that slight injustice.

The last round saw keen competition for the big prizes. It was still barely possible to believe that Hou Yifan was out ahead of the field but her three wins against 2700+ wins proved her right to be there beyond all shadow of a doubt. Could she go the extra mile and win outright? She came pretty close. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov was her highest rated opponent yet but she played in the same way that had brought her success in previous rounds. She showed no fear and sustained pressure throughout, and was not afraid to give up material (in this case a pawn) to maintain her positional edge. The last few moves were played with both players in considerable time pressure, relying purely on the 30-second increment for thinking time. No mistakes were made and the position petered out to a draw.

Hou Yifan drawing meant that others could catch her by winning their games. Nigel Short and Viktor Bologan were soon in the ascendant, against Krishnan Sasikiran and Michael Adams respectively. The Moldovan GM pressed hard and won a pawn. Most pundits thought this should be enough to win but reckoned without the British Champion’s resilience. A draw resulted, leaving both players out of the running for first prize.

Nigel Short showed courage from the off, playing Black against Sasikiran and adopting the risky Modern Benoni. Things remained fairly even until move 29 when a slip by the Indian GM was exploited by Nigel to win pawn. The position still remained fairly loose and unclear, but Nigel remained rock steady and gradually reeled in the win. It was a classic Short game – risk-taking, counterattacking play to reach a messy position which his well-honed tactical ability enables him to win.

This meant a tie-break – two games at the rate of 10 minutes for all the moves, plus a 5-second increment. Adjusting from longplay chess to rapidplay can be difficult, as attested by Michael Adams, who joined the commentary team for the finale. Michael knows this better than anyone as winner of an earlier Gibraltar shoot-out. In the tie-break, experience finally triumphed over youth. Nigel is an inveterate blitz player and he soon gained the upper hand in both games. That said, experts spotted a fleeting moment in the first game where Hou Yifan might have struck a blow but she missed her chance and lost. The second was an uphill struggle as Nigel blocked all her attacking tries, and was agreed drawn in a position where Nigel was comfortably better. But again Michael Adams was very complimentary about her play during the tournament and that is the important thing for her to take away from tournament (apart from the big cheque!).

Not quite the fairy tale finish for Hou Yifan, then, but for Nigel Short, who had lost two championship tie-breaks in the past year, at the Commonwealth and British championships, justice had finally been done. Incidentally, on a patriotic note, his English colleagues Michael Adams and David Howell also enjoyed good tournaments: between the three of them, only one game was lost – and that was the game that David lost to Michael!

Hou Yifan Breaks Through in Gibraltar

Without detracting in any way from Nigel’s commendable achievement, the big chess sensation of the past few days has been Hou Yifan’s almost unprecedented run of wins against world-class opposition. It is worth looking back at her tournament to see exactly how she did it.

The line-up in Gibraltar is formidable, with no fewer than 11 players holding ratings in excess of 2700 – the generally-recognised level at which the elite top 40 players in the world start. And there are at least 50 players in the field with grandmaster titles, or with grandmaster-level ratings. The tournament is also a magnet for the cream of women professional players, this sporting the world’s top three women players plus several more of the elite – almost certainly the strongest female line-up at a tournament in chess history.

Hou Yifan ranks 25th in the Gibraltar field. Though only 17, she has long since been identified as a genuine chess prodigy, qualifying for the woman grandmaster title before she was even in her teens. In the overall world rankings, including both men and women players, she is currently ranked 209th.

As Hou Yifan arrived to play in Gibraltar at the end of January, it was already well-known that she was a player with enormous potential who, in time, would have a good chance of challenging Judit Polgar for the status of number one woman player in the world and perhaps join the elite 2700+ players.

What came as a surprise was how little time she needed to get there! In round three she was paired with Zoltan Almasi of Hungary, rated 2717 and world ranked no.27. She played excellently, putting him under pressure and winning material and then game.

An excellent result, certainly, but players rated 2600 beat 2700s with reasonable regularity so we would be guilty of over-hyping were we to characterise this as “sensational”. The next day Hou Yifan faced another stern test, against the top English player Michael Adams, rated 2724 and number 25 in the world. She faced him down in his favourite Marshall Attack and held him to comfortable draw.

Next round, a set-back – a loss to Krishnan Sasikiran. She was then paired with the strong woman player Mariya Muzychuk, a likely future rival for the women’s world championship title. A tough game, but Hou Yifan’s quick tactical eye netted her another win.

Her score at this stage was 4½/6 – an excellent performance and half a point behind the eight leaders on 5. Yet, if any pundit had suggested at this point that Hou Yifan would go on to tie for first place in the tournament, I doubt they would have been taken seriously! This is the point where her tournament really took off and transported her into the stratosphere.

Providence took a hand in the shape of the pairings. She was to have the white pieces against Judit Polgar, the strongest woman chessplayer who has ever lived. That statement doesn’t need to be qualified or hedged in any way – it is simply a fact. Was Hou Yifan up to the challenge? She’s such a shy, slight young woman, and with an appearance younger than her age, that it is too easy to assume that she might be daunted by such a challenge. But appearances can be very deceptive: she packs a lot of chessboard confidence and aggression into her slight frame and relishes a challenge.

The game with Judit Polgar was balanced until about move 20 when it was Judit who faltered. It was really only a half-chance for Hou Yifan but she grasped her opportunity with alacrity and scored a sensational victory. Now the world’s word processors really started whirring. Judit, it has been pointed out, had not lost a long play tournament game to a woman player for 20 years (and that was to her own sister, Susan!). True, she has played very few games against women in that time, but that is simply because she has spent most of those two decades matched with her peer group – which didn’t include any other women players!

Clearly this was a watershed moment for women’s chess. Hou Yifan had demonstrated that she was a worthy opponent for Judit Polgar. Suddenly we have the makings of a women’s chess rivalry. As well as a great moment for Hou Yifan, it marked the culmination of years of effort and planning at the Gibraltar tournament, where women’s chess has long been given a greater priority than elsewhere on the chess circuit. The meeting of the two star women players and the sensational result… well, it simply couldn’t have happened anywhere other than in Gibraltar!

That was a red-letter day for Hou Yifan and took her into joint second place behind the leader Michael Adams. I guess most of us chess pundits thought that might be the high watermark for her challenge. Surely one of these experienced 2700+ rated players would overcome her challenge? Next up she faced Le Quang Liem, rated 2714 and ranked 29th in the world. Once again Hou Yifan played aggressively, sacrificing two pawns to mix it up. Both players were short of time and the Vietnamese GM blundered and lost. But GMs only blunder when they are put under pressure – the trick is to give them lots of problems to solve and exploit the chances when they come. Mikhail Tal knew how to do it – and so apparently does Hou Yifan!

Hou Yifan was now tied first with Michael Adams on 6½. This was quite simply uncharted territory. Over the past few years, we’ve seen women players such as Antoaneta Stefanova, Nana Dzagnidze and Viktorija Cmilyte go toe to toe with the super-GMs at Gibraltar but they’ve not flown quite so high in the table. Even Judit Polgar was a point adrift of this score. Logic, reason and the rating list dictated that Hou Yifan’s run should end around here. When the pairings went up – Black against Alexei Shirov – that seemed to put the tin hat on it. Shirov is rated 2710 and ranked 31st. More significantly, he is one of the most admired players of the modern era, who beat Vladimir Kramnik to qualify for a world title match against Garry Kasparov in the late 1990s (though sadly the match never happened because of financial difficulties).

A bridge too far for Hou Yifan? No! She played a counterattacking line of the Najdorf Sicilian made famous by Bobby Fischer – the Poisoned Pawn variation. This was a statement that she intended to go toe to toe with her famous adversary. A great chunk of opening theory ensued – the women’s world champion knows her theory extremely well – and Shirov innovated by taking her b-pawn. But it seemed to be laced with more poison than his own b2 pawn and his position started to wilt as Hou Yifan’s position gradually got better. Eventually it came down to a level ending but one where Hou Yifan’s pair of pawns were just a little bit more advanced and threatening than Shirov’s and the Latvian’s super-GM’s king was trapped on the back rank. Would she start getting nervous and blow it? No – she hung and won.

I guess it was at this point that most of us realised that Hou Yifan had broken through some sort of barrier. Two barriers, actually: the big deal a couple of rounds previously had been the face-off between the two top women players but that had become almost an irrelevance. Hou Yifan had already moved on and was showing that it wasn’t just about beating Judit. She had proved that she was capable of dishing out punishment to any 2700 who sat in front of her.

What we were seeing was a player who had made a large jump in standard in a very short time. The clue was there in her world championship match last year with Humpy Koneru. On paper the two were closely matched but the evidence of the chess and the ease of the result suggested that Hou Yifan had put a distance between herself and her Indian challenger. After the last round, Michael Adams joined the commentary team for the play-offs and made much the same point. Basically, the rating list hasn’t quite caught up her rapid rate of improvement. Her playing strength is that of a 2700+ player.

The win against Alexei Shirov had done something else. Hou Yifan was now in the lead on her own! There was still one round to go. Would she suddenly get nervous and experience fear of success, like a tennis star serving for their first Grand Slam title? I think we knew enough about her temperament by now to think better of such a pessimistic idea. The pairing was her toughest yet – Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, 2747 rating and ranked 14th in the world. She played an enterprising game, sacrificing a pawn for some active piece play. Once again the key to her play was to pressurise her opponent and give herself opportunities to demonstrate her tactical prowess. Mamedyarov was a tough nut to crack, though, and he held firm. But, make no mistake, Hou Yifan made the running in this game.

This guaranteed her a tie for first place and Nigel Short managed to reach the same score as her. We won’t dwell on the play-off match. Nigel is a formidable blitz player and he played it excellently. For him victory was hugely deserved as he always turns it on in Gibraltar and was in any case extremely unlucky not to take first last year with a huge 8½/10 score that only Vasily Ivanchuk on his stratospherically best form could eclipse. Michael Adams in the commentary box explained the difficulty of adjusting to a super-fast time control after ten rounds of longplay chess and that may well explain Hou Yifan’s showing in the shoot-out. It doesn’t detract at all from what went before.

But what a performance by Hou Yifan! Chess pundits have been casting around the last few days, trying to think of something to match it. Judit Polgar put in a marvellous performance in Madrid in 1994 but the doyen of Spanish chess journalists, Leontxo García, present in Gibraltar, opined that Hou Yifan’s was the better one. Hou Yifan has left women’s records behind and is already looking for new worlds to conquer.

One comparable performance that does spring to mind was the (then) unknown Alexander Morozevich’s 9½/10 at the last Lloyds Bank Masters in London in 1994. Having witnessed it at first hand, I recall that it caused a sensation and marked the birth of a new star. Of course, many of the great names of chess, such as Karpov, Kasparov and Fischer, made spectacular breakthroughs in one of their early outings.

I am tempted to compare it with the sporting achievement of another 17-year-old outsider who surprised the pundits and fans in one of his first big open tournaments. Boris Becker at Wimbledon in 1985! I hope someone mentions Hou Yifan’s performance to him – he’s a keen chessplayer and came along as a honoured guest to the 2011 London Chess Classic.

The final word must go to the tournament itself. Given the emphasis placed by the organisers on the women’s element of the tournament, I can think of no finer way for the tournament to celebrate its own tenth anniversary than by seeing one of the women competitors tie for first place. And just as Hou Yifan went from outsider to first place over ten rounds, the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival has gone from small beginnings to the world’s premier open tournament over ten years. They are both amazing achievements.

Chess daily news from Susan Polgar