Apologies for no update yesterday, I found myself snowed under with work (checking the English for the ChessVibes Openings (check www.chessvibes.com) and then I had a deadline for ChessBase to annotate a couple of games from the European Championships. I eventually finished the work at 2.30am!
Round Five I was paired with the scarily improving Nicolai Getz. He’s currently only an FM with 2333 rating but is gaining 45 pts this list before this tournament (and only 13 here) and is consistently performing at a 2500 level. I hear he’s good friends with Magnus too… I tried out the Caro-Kann as I saw he didn’t like facing it. A tough battle ensued where I should have had the advantage but played a couple of careless moves and he suddenly had a big edge although perhaps it wasn’t quite winning and I held the endgame.
Onto Round Six and here I played Eirik Gullaksen, an IM and runs the Bergen chess club. I was lucky that he stumbled down a line I had given in my new book and was just lost out of the opening. The game lasted 30 moves and I spent less than 16 minutes; chess is easy when you get your preparation in. We followed a game I annotate (Sutovsky-Baron) from last year until move 19 and by move 22 he was a piece down. The game was over within 90 minutes.
###pgn###[Event “Fagernes Norwegian Championship”] [Site “?”] [Date “2011.04.21”] [Round “6”] [White “Jones, G.”] [Black “Gullaksen, E.”] [Result “1-0”] [ECO “B31”] [WhiteElo “2578”] [BlackElo “2351”] [PlyCount “59”] 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 g6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. d3 Bg7 6. h3 Nf6 7. Nc3 Nd7 8. Be3 e5 9. Qd2 h6 10. O-O Qe7 11. Nh2 Nf8 12. f4 exf4 13. Bxf4 Ne6 14. Bg3 Nd4 15. Rae1 O-O 16. e5 Bf5 17. Ne4 Bxe4 18. Rxe4 h5 19. Bh4 Qc7 20. Bf6 Rae8 21. c3 Bxf6 22. exf6 Rxe4 23. cxd4 Re6 24. Qh6 Rxf6 25. Rxf6 cxd4 26. Nf3 Qe7 27. Ng5 Qe3+ 28. Rf2 Qe1+ 29. Rf1 Qe3+ 30. Kh1 1-0%%%pgn%%%
Matt also won his game fairly quickly and so we went for another short walk around the town. Strangely none of the supermarkets seem to open on Easter Thursday and so we decided to go to the bar next to the hotel for our first couple of beers of the tournament. This evening we played in a blitz tournament. I managed to beat the other GMs competing and ran out the winner with 10/11 dropping one game to a player rated just 2000 but a blitz specialist. A good day in all; a quick win in my tournament game and winning the blitz, hopefully the rest of my stay here will go well too.