Potpourri Time

Kramnik on cheating (pro and con), Erigaisi in action (and a kinda-sorta pseudo bet), remembering Paul Keres, and Go Irish!

I haven’t followed Vladimir Kramnik’s incessant non-accusation accusations of cheating over the past few months, mostly noticing Hikaru Nakamura’s trolling Kramnik in thumbnails on my YouTube feed, but after a long hiatus from that ugliness I decided to check out a Kramnik compilation video and Nakamura’s presentation and discussion of David Navara’s response to Kramnik’s implicitly accusing/”accusing” Navara of unduly accurate play when under 10 seconds left for the game. While I understand Kramnik’s frustration with online cheating, I frankly find his shotgun approach and “wink, wink; nudge, nudge” approach sickening. (Chess friends and long-time blog readers know that I’ve been a big Kramnik fan for a very long time, and defended him against what I took and still take to have been Veselin Topalov & Silvio Danailov’s baseless allegations of cheating in their “Toiletgate” match in 2006. So this isn’t me finding some excuse to pick on Kramnik, who was one of my favorite players going back to the 1990s.)

The main event these days is Norway Chess, but other top players are also in action, including the world’s current #4 player, Arjun Erigaisi. (He didn’t make the Candidates, but he’s the highest-rated Indian player, ahead of Gukesh, Pragg, and Vishy.) Here’s a recent game of his, attractively demonstrating the gap between a “regular” GM and a super-GM.

Seeing Erigaisi cross 2770 (if only by a hair) reminds me of a comment I made during the 2022 Chess Olympiad. The Indian B team, which consisted mainly of their youngsters, and the Uzbek team (also starring youngsters including world #6 Nodirbek Abdusattorov) were the main contenders, and I was so impressed by the kiddies that - if I recall correctly - I said that Erigaisi, Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Nihal Sarin, and Abdusattorov would all be 2800s or at least in the high 2700s in a couple of years. (But maybe I said that this would be the case by the end of 2023. If so, I was wrong.) My idea of “high 2700s” was 2770+, though maybe 2767+ would suffice.

At any rate, it’s not yet two years, but my prediction seems to be right or at least on track for everyone but Nihal. He hasn’t managed to cross 2700, peaking so far at 2698 back in March. But for everyone else, they’ve done it or are very close to having done it. Erigaisi is 2770.1, Abdusattorov is 2766, Gukesh is 2763 (and more importantly, has qualified for the World Championship match with Ding Liren), and Praggnanandhaa is 2755.9.

One thing that occurs to me is that those four are all in the top nine, which in some years (I think) required a higher rating. There have been 15 players who have surpassed the 2800 milestone, with two more players who, had their ratings been rounded up when they hit their peaks, would have made 2800 as well. It seems that a lot of these top guys have fallen, and maybe something has happened to deflate the absolute top ratings. (Maybe the top guys are spending so much time in online blitz and rapid events that they’ve lost a bit of their classical strength?) Anyway, the superstars of the last Olympiad are living up to their promise.

Next up: yesterday (still today for those of you on the west coast of North America) the 49th anniversary of the death of the great Paul Keres (1916-1975). If you’re unfamiliar with the Estonian great, think of the heartbreak suffered by Nepo in his match with Ding last year, and Caruana’s agonizing near-miss against Nepo. Add it together, and then multiply it a few times, and you’ll get a sense of Keres’ career and his bad luck, near-misses and all the rest. At least until Viktor Korchnoi’s near-misses against Anatoly Karpov in the 1970s, Keres was clearly the strongest player never to become World Champion. He was also a great endgame analyst, an influential opening theorist, and by all accounts a fine sportsman, universally liked, and a gentleman. Here’s one of his famous wins, against Boris Spassky (who is still with us at the age of 87).

Enough chess; let’s talk about the University of Notre Dame! I’m still hoping their football team will win another national championship before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but in the meantime their men’s lacrosse team has taken up the slack. A week or so ago they won the national championship - and for the second year running. Long-time blog readers know that it’s time for a song…sorry (not sorry).