Chess in Cheek

After Norwegian Magnus Carlsen and Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, wunderkinds of the World Cup, charged through the quarterfinals, leaving Cheparinov and Alekseev in the dust as the latest in a long string of victims, promoters of youth chess drooled at the prospect of an all-underage World Cup Final. Chess would become sexy, the voting age would be lowered, and good-looking high school girls would dump their jock boyfriends and start dating nerdy boardgame players.

Instead, the two red-eyed seventeen year olds are on their way back to their respective mothers.

Two hardened veterans, Tatar-American Gata Kamsky and Lettish-Spaniard Alexei Shirov, crushed the teenagers in their tracks, Kamsky hammering Carlsen with an exchange up as White after easily holding a draw as Black, Shirov dominating his tiebreak with Karjakin so much that he barely missed needlessly winning both games.

Gata Kamsky: You talkin’ to me, kid?

Going into the semis each needing to win a mere four matches in a row to gain the 2009 World Championship, the two juniors were just starting to scream, “I want it! I want it!”, but, alas, they did not get it. They did earn coveted spots in the Grand Prix that give them a shot at playing for the World Championship in 2010, which, combined with copious quantities of cookies and warm milk, will have to console them for now–and hopefully quiet them down.

Finalists Shirov and Kamsky have only had to play one tiebreaker apiece, each of them winning five of their six two-game matchups at classical time controls. Shirov now has a chance to achieve his fondest dream by avenging his match victory over Kramnik in 1998. Kramnik capitalized on the loss to achieve a title match with Kasparov, and the rest is history. Shirov is still smarting from the triumph. If he can overcome Kamsky and Topalov in match play, and Kramnik beats Anand to regain the world championship, Shirov will have a chance to finally prove that he really isn’t as good as Kramnik after all.

Kamsky is benefitting from playing the Cup in his native Siberia, where he grew up in relative freedom during the Soviet era, since he could not be sent to Siberia. After failing to win the right to challenge Kasparov in the nineties, he spent seven years away from chess. If Carlsen and Karjakin had done this, they would have to call up their babysitters to relearn how the horsie moves.

Viking invader Carlsen–the only non-Soviet born semifinalist–was driven back to the only slightly less frigid shores of Norway. His flotilla of chess skills defeated, he will have to content himself with sinking boats in his bathtub.

Magnus the Red: repelled from Russian shores