NH Chess Tournament 2010 Round 1 Recap

August 12, 2010 • General

Hello everyone! Greetings from sunny Amsterdam, Netherlands. After a fairly calm journey, I finally have had the chance to take in two days now and the weather as well as people have been nothing but curteous.

In the first round, I got White against GM Lubomir Ljubojevic in a repeat of my first round last year except with colors reversed. Ljubo somewhat surprised me by choosing to play the accelerated dragon once again. I chose to play a fairly passive and uncomplicated variation, but true to his style, Ljubo found a way to create quite a few complications. After the first series of fireworks, we reached a position where positionally I had an advantage due to an isolated d pawn, however Ljubo’s counterplay was almost certainly sufficient. Fortunately, all these many years of blitz paid off as I outplayed Ljubo in the mad time scramble which ensued and collected the whole point. Although I’m not particularly enthused by the actual game and my play in it, the result was what I was hoping for and coming off a three month hiatus from chess, it was a good way to shake off some of the rust! Stay tuned for more as I take on GM Loek van Wely tomorrow with Black.

Cheers,
Hikaru

8.12.2010