Morelia Linares 2008 has started

Round one report, replayable games

Mexican leg of the Morelia Linares 2008 super tournament started of with a nice surprise as we saw three Sicilians in the first round. Sicilian was rare animal in the last event that took place on the Mexican soil - World Chess Championship. Replayable games bellow.

Round 1 results:

Alexei Shirov - Vishwanatan Anand 0-1
Magnus Carlsen - Vassily Ivanchuk draw
Peter Leko - Teimour Radjabov 1-0
Veselin Topalov - Levon Aronian 1-0

Alexei Shirov attacked Vishy Anand without pardon, but one useless queen move proved to be a mistake as Anand started counterattack after solidifying with 24...Bd5. Already on the next move he missed crushing 25...e4! (cleaning e5 for the queen). Nevertheless, black had the game under control and used his second chance to deliver a cute combination (28...Nce4!) and call for curtains.

Alexei Shirov vs Vishy Anand

Magnus Carlsen enjoyed fine positional and time advantage against Vassily Ivanchuk but failed to find the winning plan. He tried his best though, but Ivanchuk used a moment to threaten back, thus exchanging the queens and reaching drawish endgame.

Levon Aronian didn't react accordingly to Veselin Topalov's aggressive 15. f4 and quickly caved into weaker position. Topalov's bishops tenaciously harassed black pieces and Aronian was forced to drop the exchange. Game was over pretty soon.

It appeared that Teimour Radjabov was standing well with black against Peter Leko, but couple of precise moves (27. Qa3!, 28. Be6!) underlined the defects in black's Sveshnikov structure. Faced with the threat of c4-c5, Radjabov had to dive into complications, but it turned out that white's control of the 7th rank decided the outcome.

Round 2 pairings:

Vishy Anand - Levon Aronian
Teimour Radjabov - Veselin Topalov
Vassily Ivanchuk - Peter Leko
Alexei Shirov - Magnus Carlsen

Join us on Saturday at 16:30 EST / 22:30 CET for the live commentary on the 2nd round of Morelia-Linares. GM Vladimir Dimitrov and Goran Urosevic will cover Anand-Aronian and Shirov-Carlsen. See you there!