There are only 72 hours left in 2012 and it is a good time to make some recapitulation of (not only) my achievements in this year.
This is a time when I can make some statistical analysis and publish some of my plans for 2013.
For the regular readers of this blog, information in this post are mostly known, but there will be some talk about my future tournaments.
What can be remembered in 2012 in my career?
Here is the long waiting article about Improvement in the openings, second part.
In the first part I wrote some theoretical thoughts about this subject, and in this part it will be more practical examples.
With this article I will finish these articles about Improvement in chess, and I hope that some of you took some advantage out of them.
I wrote about what I think is the best way to improve at chess, and what helped me to reach my level.
According to the readers feedback, the combinations in December were harder then usual.
However few of them were solved pretty easy while one of them was not solved by anyone who talked with me.
As I am going to play two tournaments in January, which means that there will be the reports from the tournaments and so on, there will be no January combinations on this blog, but as a compensation for that I shall publish some tactical moments from the games in December.
It is important to understand that the tactics is not some independent element in the game as it is mainly determined by successful strategy.
If you are a loyal reader of this blog, than you already know that I, from time to time, provide the readers some combinations which I found interesting.
With eight combinations which I will publish today, number is already up to 31 from August.
For those who are ambitious with chess it is not enough, and I hope that the number of the combinations which you solved during the Autumn is at least multiplied with three.
There are of course the readers who just want to see some fun in these combinations so I did one mixture of both.
Some of them are just nice, and some of the combinations are useful in order to improve specific skills.
I was in Malmö today and I was watching Malmö Open 2012.
I played this tournament three times but this year I decided to skip it in order to spare some time for my training.
I took some photos and have a good time chatting with friends between rounds.
I want you to put special attention on the three pictures of Mladen Gajic and position of his king and queen.
By the way I left the playing hall during the fifth round when Hillarp Persson and Jonny Hector played their game for, I suppose, tournament victory.
Magnus Carlsen from Norway won London Chess Classic 2012.
He played extremely good, and his victory is completely deserved.
Slightly behind Carlsen was Vladimir Kramnik.
On classical table he finished just half point after Carlsen, and made fantastic result with +4 (every player played 8 games, compared with usual 9 games).
After they there were some bright moments from Adams and Nakamura but nobody else deserved so much praise as Carlsen and Kramnik.
In the ninth round Kramnik had a very little chance to do something.
He agreed on draw with Adams much earlier then Carlsen finished his game against Anand.
As I said yesterday, one could easily predict that tomorrows round will decide who will win this years edition of London Chess Classic.
Kramnik won his game against Jones and he is just half a point behind Magnus Carlsen (who had a free round).
Michael Adams played just a draw against Levon Aronian and he is out of the fight for the first place.
In other games Polgar won as black against McShane and showed that she still can play on a very high level.
Anand and Nakamura played a very good and interesting game in which Anand had a big advantage out of opening but Hikaru missed some clear winning continuations near the end.
This was the first round with all games drawn.
It does not means that there were no fight, of course.
Vladimir Kramnik was free today and he was commentating in the commentator´s room.
According to feedback from the public and people from tweeter, he is by far the best commentator in the tournament.
Magnus Carlsen had a chance to clinch his victory in the tournament, but even he made a mistake and was forced to switch to the defence against Hikaru Nakamura.
Adams could make thinks interesting in the finish of the tournament, but he managed not to win his promising position against Luke McShane.
There were many interesting things in sixth round of London Chess Classic.
Magnus Carlsen is unstoppable. He won once more, this time against Judit Polgar. It means that he has 5,5 out of 6 in traditional scoring system, but if you are playing as Magnus plays at the moment, it does not matter what is the scoring system.
It is fair to say that even Vladimir Kramnik plays in a very good form, but still his 4,5 out of 6 (+3) is not enough for more then the second place.
Adams was very unlucky yesterday, but today he got everything back in the game against World Champion, Anand.
Today was finished fifth round of this year edition of London Chess Classic.
It seems that one of the favourites for the first place (at least after the first four rounds), Michael Adams is not anymore in the race.
He had advantage against Magnus Carlsen almost all the game, but somewhere in the time trouble he started to lose control, and just lost.
Besides Carlsen, there are one more player who are playing excellently.
Vladimir Kramnik played, according to me, the best game in the tournament so far.
He won against Luke McShane. Another two games had decisive results also.
The fourth round of the fourth edition of London chess Classic was played yesterday.
On the top, Magnus Carlsen made a step forward as he won his game against lowest rated player with "only" 2644 Elo points, while Vladimir Kramnik played "just" a draw against The World Champion Wishy Anand.
Hikaru Nakamura did not manage to get something real against very solid play of Michael Adams, while the game of the day was the game between Levon Aronian and Luke McShane.
It looked that Aronian will win this game quite easily, but Luke put very hard resistance. After very interesting endgame Aronian won his first game in the tournament.
Today is a free day in London and except a report from the fourth round which will be published a little later I want to publish some interesting details from the games from the fourth round of Elitserien.
The position on the diagram is not from my game, but from the game on the board number 8.
We have some hopes that White maybe could win this position, but not so realistic (All right we were desperate).
Nobody could imagine that we will lose on this board (Should I remind you that Eksjö SK player was White? ).
Let´s see what happened.
I can only say that I am very lucky that tomorrow is a free day, as otherwise these reports are really strange in this retrospective form.
So, you can expect to get a report from round number four tomorrow and than it will be the reports from the rounds immediately after the rounds.
In round number three played Kramnik against Carlsen and it was the game which I considered the most interesting in the whole tournament.
Kramnik played well, but Carlsen´s level of resistance was on a very high level and he drew after the long fight.
In other games, Adams won against Polgar with two additional draws.
I realised that I will never be up to date if I publish these reports from London Chess Classic one day after the games were played.
However, if I want to produce some quality thoughts than I need some time to think about the games.
So, yesterday, 2. December was played round number two and we had couple of interesting games.
First of all, there was the game between World number one, Magnus Carlsen and World number two Levon Aronian.
Magnus won in very nice style.
The second most interesting game was game between Vladimir Kramnik and Nakamura. Kramnik won with black pieces and he and Carlsen has two out of two points.
The current World Champion Wishy Anand had a free day in the first round of this year edition of London Chess Classic.
He was a guest in the commentary room, but I missed that as I played for my club in the Swedish league.
As I was not followed the games during the time when they were played I am not going to analyse what happened in round number one.
Starting from tomorrow I will analyse some interesting moments and share some thoughts about games from round two, all the way to the finish of the tournament.
Somewhere in between (most probably on the free day, but maybe even tomorrow) I will show some details from the Elitserien.
Yesterday were played three matches of Swedish highest division, Elitserien.
Eksjö SK was not very successful as we lost against SS Manhem with high result 2-6.
In other matches in Scanias derby Limhamns SK won against LASK, despite huge difference in rating for club from Lund.
Orgryte SK played against Västerås SK and the match ended in a draw, 4-4.
Two more matches will be played in February in "mini-sammandrag" in Stockholm.
