Not much to say about today’s game really. Black against Leif Johannessen a Norwegian GM, he surprised me in the opening playing the Four Pawns Attack against my Kings Indian playing in a positional style with capturing on c5. Actually I played a move order that I thought prevented this but couldn’t remember my analysis at the board and will have to have a further look. In the post-mortem Leif and Øystein (the organiser of the event) told me that this was the speciality of Svein Johannessen, Norway’s top player in the 1960s and Øystein recently wrote a book about him.
I tried to punish Leif’s choice but spent a lot of time and only resulted in being slightly worse but held the draw without too much difficulty. In the final position I would have played on with White but Black should be able to hold easily enough. The top seed Sergey Tiviakov beat Lars Karlsson on top board while Sergey Kasparov (no relation!) beat Yuri Solodovnichenko to move into outright second. As things stand Tiviakov has 6/7, Kasparov, 5.5/7 and then there are seven of us chasing on 5/7. Tomorrow I’ve got White against Michael Richter an IM from Germany so hopefully I can put some pressure on the two ahead of me.
###pgn###[Event “Fagernes Norwegian Championship”] [Site “?”] [Date “2011.04.22”] [Round “7”] [White “Johannessen, Leif Erlend”] [Black “Jones, Gawain C”] [Result “1/2-1/2”] [ECO “E76”] [WhiteElo “2514”] [BlackElo “2578”] [PlyCount “56”] 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4 d6 5. f4 c5 6. dxc5 Qa5 7. Bd3 Ng4 8. Bd2 Qxc5 9. Qe2 Nc6 10. Nf3 Nb4 11. Bb1 Be6 12. Ng5 Qxc4 13. Nxe6 Qxe6 14. Qb5+ Nc6 15. Qxb7 Qc8 16. Qxc8+ Rxc8 17. h3 Nf6 18. Bd3 Nd7 19. Rc1 O-O 20. Ba6 Rb8 21. Nd5 e6 22. Rxc6 exd5 23. b3 Rfe8 24. Rxd6 Rxe4+ 25. Kd1 Nc5 26. Rc6 Re6 27. Rxc5 Rxa6 28. Ra5 Rxa5 1/2-1/2%%%pgn%%%