A double round day meant not so much time to prepare and as my opponent seemed to play lots of different things I took it pretty easy. He chose 1…e5 and 2…Nc6. I decided to go for a Scotch and we followed the critical game Shirov-Kramnik from Wijk aan Zee in January. I deviated on move 13 with a tricky new idea. The position became very complicated and Xavier blundered on move 15 allowing me to pick up the exchange. Instead I chose to continue the attack and won quickly (although there was one point where he could have survived into just a clearly worse position).
###pgn###[Event “Corsica Masters”] [Site “Bastia FRA”] [Date “2011.10.26”] [Round “6”] [White “Jones, G.”] [Black “Bedouin, Xavier”] [Result “1-0”] [ECO “C45”] [WhiteElo “2624”] [BlackElo “2406”] [PlyCount “49”] [EventDate “2011.07.25”] [EventType “swiss”] [EventRounds “11”] [EventCountry “ENG”] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nxc6 bxc6 6. e5 Qe7 7. Qe2 Nd5 8. c4 Nb6 9. Nc3 Bb7 10. Bd2 g6 11. Ne4 O-O-O 12. a4 Ba6 13. f3 Bxc4 14. Qf2 Bxf1 15. Kxf1 d5 16. exd6 cxd6 17. Bg5 Qe6 18. a5 Nd5 19. Qxa7 Be7 20. Rc1 Qd7 21. Qa6+ Kc7 22. Bxe7 Nxe7 23. Nf6 Qe6 24. Qb6+ Kc8 25. a6 1-0%%%pgn%%%
Playing again in less than two hours but the pairings are still not up. Just three games to go now. The important thing is to be in the top 14 to qualify for the knockout where I believe we will be joined by the two invited players, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, who knocked me out in the ¼ finals last time and went on to win the tournament, and the World Champion Vishy Anand!