Yes it was interesting to watch how quickly his position crumbled.
Overall, it seems to me like Anand is a more mature player and his win in this match was fully deserved. I am looking forward when some stronger player like Carlsen or even the younger guys will challenge him.
Even if you don't see that specific move you see that your king is going to a corner. The bishop in a8 controls the long diagonal and is pointing directly at your king. Your rocks are uncoordinated while black's will soon be doubled and will control the d file.
Yep. Even if Topalov missed 34...Qe8!, he should have seen how dangerous it was to open the diagonal for the bishop and walk his king to h3. Maybe he thought he could outplay Anand in a complicated position, but Vishy was more than up to the task. (His technique for the final 20 moves was flawless.)
Maybe Topalov realized that he would be a big underdog in a rapid/blitz playoff against Anand and decided to take his chances in the last slow time-control game.
36...Qd8+ only looks better to a computer. The idea is 37. f6 hxg4 38.Nxg4 gxf6 threatening ...Rh7+ or 37. Kg3 Qd6+ 38. Kh4 Qh6!
But Anand's 36...g5+ is much easier for a human to play. It's easier to see White's reasonable responses and how to deal with them.
Anand never made a move that let go of his winning advantage, and all the (mild) criticisms of his play are based on moves that computers think win a little faster; but a human should play to win as reliably as possible, and that's what he did.
I am astonished though by Topalov's mistakes capturing the f and e pawns. They were inexplicable, because they're not really tactical errors at all; they simply show terrible positional misunderstanding.
37. Kh3 Qg5 threatening mayhem on g4. Best is 38. Qg1 to protect g4; then ...Re7 gets rid of the knight, one way or another, and g4 goes bang anyway.
37. Kg3 Qd6+; Kh3 or Kh4 Qh6 threatening mayhem on the h-file.
37. f6 Rf7 followed by hxg4 and g3+ and the WK has nowhere to hide. If, say, 38. Qf1 hxg4; Kg3 to stop this then Qd6+; Kh4 g3+ and White is toast. In some variations B can just play ...Rxf6 instead of ...hxg4, and again the WK ends up with nowhere to hide.
(I'm a patzer, or more precisely a rusty club-level player; the above is the result of some experimenting with a strong computer program. I may have missed important things.)
I totally agree. I've read many chess books and this definitely had the most impact on my chess style & ability.
"My System" teaches you chess strategy so along with this I also recommend "Think Live a Grandmaster" by Alexander Kotov. This trains yor brain work like a chess machine :)
There's nothing special or interesting in this article except for people who already play chess at a very high level. Heck, I wonder how many Hacker News readers could tell the difference between this game and a game between the two best players in Rhode Island (no offense to Rhode Island.) And the Hacker News readers who can learn from this article already know where to find coverage, so why post it on HN?
If you're at all interested in chess (as I expect some reasonable minority of HN readers are) it's rather big news, wouldn't you say? Even if you couldn't tell the difference et al. the article still has a good summary of the event and the game that would be accessible to a club player.
It's got to be both more newsworthy and also more interesting than some random Techcrunch headline if you're even a casual chess player, and I won't even start on Wikipedia links, etc.
There are many categories of articles that are newsworthy but not HN-worthy; let's not add another to the front page. The test is whether HN readers will find the article intellectually engaging. Let's face it, this article is two things:
1. The fact that Anand won. Anand instead of Topolov, okay, how is this fact intellectually engaging to me unless I'm a fan of one or the other?
2. The game itself. What's interesting about this game except the fact that it's played waaaaaaay above my skill level, and therefore represents an opportunity to learn? There are craploads of those games out there. You can get a subscription to Chess Life and get dozens of grandmaster games every month. Except for players who are very unusually skilled, this game is not any more interesting or engaging than any of the thousands of games played every year between lower-level grandmasters. Those rare players (certainly at least expert level; anyone under expert level who thinks they can learn more from Anand's moves than they can from a random International Master is fooling themselves) are already following this news on chess sites.
So, to sum up, everyone for whom this article has special interest will see it elsewhere. Nobody who will only see it here can tell the difference between this game and the thousands of other grandmaster games played every year.
Counterpoint: I (indeed, an expert) am interested in this article and I may not have seen the game until my New in Chess arrives, because I've been too lazy to keep up closely with the championship. I appreciate seeing it here immediately, just because it's nice to be timely without having to put a chess website on my RSS reader. As I mentioned, I think a club player with an interest in the chess world would find it engaging, even if they "couldn't tell the difference" between it and another grandmaster game.
I don't think your logic corresponds to the actual community preference when it comes to putting things on the front page. There are a huge amount of general interest articles devoted to things that everyone will see elsewhere. It's because people like having one-stop shopping for recent news and because people value the HN comment threads on news items. (I did go and spend a few minutes examining the portion of the game that they're discussing above, and I'm the better for it, I suppose.)
Look, I'm with you if think that we should only have really fascinating content that people are unlikely to find on their own, like some awesome technical Metafilter. I would love a site like that. Go make one. On the HN front page is an article about today's Senate vote on the Sanders amendment; the same "1000 true fans" article we've all seen ten times for two years; an obituary for Frank Frazetta from the NYT; assorted press releases from small companies; a repost from Reddit about Facebook FUD. (To be fair, there are some good posts, too.) So that's not what we have. We have general interest articles about all kinds of vaguely newsworthy things with OK commentary. Hell, we frequently have the very same articles posted month after month. On that scale, I think this weighs in above average.
Overall some really good games, I thought Topalov was going to win, but he sure made a blunder in game 12 - - maybe he was under too much pressure.