Saturday, April 10, 2010

A "novelty" played in 1500 games before

In one of the Russian chess forums (ШПиЛ) I did read interesting story by Alexander Khalifman from current Russian Team Championship.

V.Ivanchuk - A.Grischuk
08.04.2010, (7)
WHITE TO MOVE
In this position the best well known move in top level is 16.Be3. At least Grischuk did expect it and he was surprised when Ivanchuk played 16.Kh1 - it was novelty for him. The power of novelty worked and 10 moves later Black position was hopeless. GM Sergey Zagrebelny (Chesspro online commentator) in his online comments tells that 16.Kh1 is very rare and has only 2 games in his database. The most interesting fact is that Khalifman (according to his own words) has about 1500 16.Kh1 games in his database. Can you imagine how surprised was Grischuk when he told him about it? :)
The explanation is simple - unlike many other GMs, Khalifman stores also CC and Advanced chess games in his database.



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