Daily Archives: June 8, 2017

Magnus Carlsen vs Hikaru Nakamura was a great fight that ended in a draw, the same result as the other four games in round three of theAltibox Norway Chess tournament. Friday is the first rest day.

The start of Carlsen vs Nakamura. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

In November 2013, when Anand was struggling in his match with Carlsen, Nakamura tweeted the following famous tweet. Ever since a clash between him and the world champion is something special.

After 12 losses and 18 draws, only in Bilbao 2016, Nakamura managed to win his first classical game against Carlsen. After that, they played the 2016 Chess.com Blitz Battle and one blitz game in December in Qatar, but today's game in Stavanger was their first classical game in a year. Itdidn't disappoint.

Via a different move order compared to last year, the players reached a g3-Dragon and again Carlsen played b2-b3 early on. This time, Nakamura was well prepared for it.

For a change, Carlsen arrived early at the game, several minutes before Nakamura. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

Carlsen was "ashamed" of 11.b3 as he "didn't grasp Hikaru's idea at all." That idea was to simply swap pieces on d4, which normally gives White a pleasant space advantagebut not here.

Happy with his position, Nakamura decided to play actively with 21...f5, the start of "insanely risky" play according to Carlsen.

However, the world champ didn't make the most of his chances. A key position was this:

Carlsen was unhappy with 24.Rc6, the best moves according to the engines but not very practical. 24.b5 would have been tougher to meet. A knight appearing on c5 will just be taken off the board.

Carlsen:"With this time control you need to play for the initiative..." Nigel Short: "...and prevent his." Carlsen: "Exactly.I have no clue what he is going to do..."

In the game, Nakamura sacrificed a pawn to create an active play, and in a phase where Carlsen missed several of his opponent's moves, he was almost lucky not to get in trouble.

Hikaru Nakamura correctly judged that he would have enough counterplay.| Photo Maria Emelianova.

Interestingly, after the game, it turned out that both players had been optimistic about their chances. In that sense, a draw was a good result.

Carlsen joins the TV2 live show every day right after he finishes. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

Levon Aronian vs Anish Giri was a great fight as well, which started slowly though, compared to the other games. While Karjakin and Anand had already drawn, and others reached endgames, these players were still in their early middlegame. That was mostly because of Aronian using a lot of time: almost 20 minutes on 13.0-0, 19 minutes on 16.Qb3, 13 minutes on 19.Bc1 and 18.5 minutes on 20.dxe5.

Giri in deep thought.In the post-mortem, he said that during the game he realized that Aronian probably looked at this opening for Black in preparation for his second round game against Nakamura. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

That last move was right afterGiri had put the board on fire as he pushed the g-pawn in front of his king two squares.A tactical sequence followed and the chess board became a mess, but more important was Aronian's horrendous time trouble. He needed to make 12 moves in less than 2 minutes.

Giri: "What we didn't take into account here is that Levon had like a couple of minutes for 12 moves. The objective evaluation of the position is absolutely irrelevant."

"This time control is very strange. You're playing the classical control and then you have 20 minutes less. It's weird. Takes time to adjust," said Aronian, who was kind of lucky that an endgame was reached where he had a number of simple moves.

Giri is impressed by the "cheapo artist," as Short called Aronian the other day. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

Aronian is not the only player having difficulty adjusting to the time control in Stavanger (which is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and then 15 minutes to finish the game with an increment of 30 seconds per move, starting from move 61).

Today Vladimir Kramnik, who drew a long game with Wesley So, revealed that he got it wrong initially. He assumed 2 hours for 40 moves and was wondering why he was getting so low on time during the first round. Then, at the start of round two, he noticed the clocks saying 1:40:00, and thought it was a mistake!

Despite attending the players meeting, Kramnik got the time control wrong during the first round. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

The first game to end today was Sergey Karjakin vs Viswanathan Anand. It only took about 1.5 hours, but there was a nice story behind it.

First, Karjakin admitted that the line he played against the Berlin wasn't anything special, but Black needs to know what he is doing. Then Anand revealed how his memory had worked: at some point, early in the game, he remembered the position with 21...Bd7. From that point onwards he was trying to figure out how to reach it!

Karjakin vs Anand. The latter "won" the opening battle as he managed to remember his analysis. | Photo Maria Emelianova.

Anand vividly remembered the conversation with one of his seconds, who suggested that 21...Bd7 move. "I almost fell off my chair," Anand said. But Black is fine there, his second told him, and today he could show it in the game.

Both Kramnik-So and MVL-Caruana can be found in the PGN file.

2017 Altibox Norway Chess | Round 3 Standings

In the evening a group of grandmasters joined in the hotel lobby. Guess what they were doing?

Friday is a rest day. The pairings for round four on Saturday are Aronian-Carlsen, Nakamura-MVL, Giri-Anand, Caruana-Kramnik, and So-Karjakin.

You can follow the games in Live Chess each day starting at 4 p.m. local time (7 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Eastern).We're providing on-site coverage on Chess.com/News and on our Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels.

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Carlsen-Nakamura Norway Clash Ends In Draw - Chess.com

By Chris Cook, for Trend

Obama's Smart Energy Strategy

On taking office in January 2009, President Barak Obama inherited a failed energy policy from the George W. Bush administration which had attempted to secure Middle East oil & gas resources by military means through creating client states and imposing one-sided contractual terms favouring US International Oil Companies (IOCs). However, China's threat in 2007 to pull the plug on the US financial system forced the US to back off in Iraq, in the same way that the US threat in 1956 to pull the plug on sterling forced the UK to pull out of Suez.

Consequently, the 2008 US financial meltdown obliged the incoming Obama administration to take a very different approach to US energy security. There were two major objectives of Obama's resource resilience energy strategy: firstly, to rid the US for good of their historic reliance on Saudi oil, and secondly, to make a transition through gas as a bridging fuel to a low carbon economy.

The first objective was achieved by Obama's investment bank collaborators who used Saudi/GCC petrodollars to inflate the oil price from its low of $35/barrel in 2009 by manipulating the Brent/BFOE benchmark oil price. The price was then maintained in a range between a collar under oil prices of $80/barrel and a US gasoline price cap at levels which would not threaten Obama's 2012 re-election chances.

The effect of these artificially high prices were firstly, to fund indiscriminate lending to US shale oil and gas developers and secondly, to finance renewable energy such as wind and solar which substituted for fossil fuels. Finally, high prices led to massive investment in energy savings such as in more efficient car engines. As a result the US increased oil production by 5m barrels per day, and made oil product savings of maybe 2m bpd. When added to new high cost global sources of oil such as Canadian tar sands, and global renewable energy and efficiency, particularly in the EU, this led by 2014 to a substantial global surplus of oil production, which has now become structurally embedded.

The increasing surplus of oil supply led as I forecast it would in 2011 to a collapse in the oil price to $45 to $50/bbl in late 2014 after the financial Quantitative Easing (QE) pump of Federal Reserve Bank dollars was finally turned off.

Obama's Energy Doctrine

Obama's strategy executed through Hilary Clinton's State/CIA power nexus was for Caspian and Qatari gas to supply Europe, displacing crude oil and oil products and competing with Russia. Resource nationalism particularly in Turkey and Syria - stood in the way of this. Meanwhile the massive US base at Al Udeid has effectively come to secure Qatari gas production and an effective position of Qatar as a US proxy in the MENA region acting against resource nationalism by promoting Islamism.

The US strategy was therefore to create a new wave of non-nationalist Sunni Islamism such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere, and Gulenism in Turkey. The outcome desired by the US was Balkanisation of the region to create a Kurdish Petro State (which would be tolerated by a Gulenist regime in Turkey) with Islamist territories elsewhere acting as conduits for Qatari gas transit to Europe by pipeline.

However, Obama's smart energy policy was so successful that the accompanying wave of new smart technology and investment led to an irreversible tipping point in the global economy of Peak Demand the effect of which is to cap the global oil price at or around $50 per barrel.

Current Events

Saudi Arabia has clearly learnt the truth of Yamani's dictum that the Oil Age is not ending for lack of oil, since they would not conduct the Aramco IPO if the future oil price trajectory were upwards. Clearly, Saudi Arabia is now casting covetous eyes on Qatari gas, since this will enable them to free crude oil for export, particularly in the summer. In other words, Qatari gas will act as a bridging fuel while their ambitious (and in my view unimplementable) Energy 2030 programme progresses. Such a Saudi gas for oil swap is unlikely to take place on favourable terms for Qatar.

So President Trump has now turned away from the Obama doctrine at least in part due to his personal antagonism to anything Obama was able to achieve in office. Unfortunately, as with his similar rejection of COP 21 and Obama's domestic US energy policy he has no constructive Plan B.

As a result of Trump's impulsive action, Saudi Arabia has now been permitted to take extraordinary measures, with the full support of the US, which essentially constitute war on Qatar by economic means. Moreover, Qatar has been presented with a detailed ultimatum including a draconian prohibition in dealings with Iran and the scope for rapid escalation is clear.

Today's events in Tehran an attack on the Majlis and an unprecedented suicide bombing at the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini provide a grave challenge to President Hassan Rouhani and his colleagues in Iran's government. Trump's top military/security team is extremely antagonistic to Iran, and clearly hope and expect that Iran will act stupidly and aggressively in response to this provocation.

What is Iran's Smart Move in this difficult position?

The Smart Move

In my view, the smart, and unexpected, policy for Iran would be to propose a constructive regional initiative based upon energy/resource co-operation and resilience. This may perhaps commence with a humanitarian offer to Qatar of essential supplies through international waters.

What appears to be a unilateral US-backed resource grab by Saudi Arabia creates an opportunity for Russia, Iran & Qatar (who between them possess more than 60% of global gas reserves) to collaborate in launching a networked physical and financial global market in natural gas based upon a new settlement between gas producers and consumers.

The market in Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) is key to such a new settlement. While historically the global natural gas market has been fragmented and largely bilateral due to deliveries via static pipelines, the last five years has seen massive new production and infrastructure for liquidising and decompressing Liquid Natural Gas (LNG). The combination of diversity of supply, flexibility of delivery and homogeneity of gas (there are many grades and qualities of oil, but CH4 is CH4) has now led to an over-supplied global 'buyer's market' in natural gas. The emergence and convergence of a global LNG price is strikingly illustrated by this chart.

I believe based upon my experience of implementing the UK Natural Gas Balancing Point Futures contract in 1995 as a Director of what is now ICE Europe that the potential now exists for a global gas 'Balancing Point' physical gas market price based upon the price at which LNG is delivered into and out of global LNG infrastructure. This could enable financial energy credit instruments (not derivatives) based upon this price which are issued, traded, cleared and settled within a global energy clearing union.

The EU, which is fuming at Trump's America First antics, as well as China, India and Turkey (whose President Erdogan has offered to intermediate), could be expected to support a new global gas market settlement, while neutral countries like Norway and Switzerland could be expected to facilitate it.

So my advice to President Rouhani is to play chess where Trump is playing the fool, and to begin a process of depoliticised energy diplomacy based upon competition for quality of energy as a service and cooperation to reduce energy costs within a new natural gas global market paradigm.

Chris Cook is a former director of the International Petroleum Exchange. He is now a strategic market consultant, entrepreneur and a commentator.

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Rouhani should play chess where Trump is playing the fool - Trend News Agency

As a fan of things that go fast, I have drag racing near the top of my must-watch motorsports list. I have been fortunate enough to attend some Outlaw Diesel Super Series events, and Ive noticed that Im definitely not the only one enjoying the thrill of the drags. The number of people who come out to spectate continues to grow, as does the total count of competitors who enter each event. More and more diesel jockeys are eager to see what they and their rigs can do on the strip. This ever-increasing enthusiasm for diesel drag racing is amazing to witness, and its definitely growing the sportin both popularity and competiveness.

In April 2017, I attended the Rudys Diesel Performance season-opening event at Piedmont Raceway in Julian, North Carolina. It was a great two days of diesel madness, highlighted by the Outlaw Diesel Super Series drawing 165 competitors to the venue to wage war in six different drag-racing classes. The category with the largest turnout was our own (well, ours and ATS Diesel Performances) 7.70 Index Class, with 62 truckers reporting to the staging lanes for the first round of eliminations. For every race across all classes, the stands were packed to near capacity with cheering spectators watching vehicles roar down the eighth-mile.

As the enthusiasm continues to increase for this type of drag racing and the competition gets more heated, drivers willingness and desire to push themselves and their vehicles to the next level will rise. Competitive people want to winthey will not voluntarily let themselves sit idly or settle for second best. Their free time is spent at the track testing and racing, or in the garage prepping and building.

It is not an easy endeavor to put the right combination of components together. The engine alone has so many different ways it can be manipulated for power. Combine that with the complexity of the rest of the drivetrain, and you have a lot to get right. Getting everything to sync together and perform at its peak is a chess game. One move can take you forward or set you back. But that desire to be on top pushes people to keep trying and experimenting with new ideas.

Ingenuity and creativity are the things that really push motorsport technology forward. The guy or gal who can really think outside the box and bring something completely different to the table may have the key to winning. I understand there are rules in many classes that limit what can be done to an engine or vehicle, but he or she who has an ability to apply new concepts to the sport (a mechanical principle or technology that is not normally associated) could gain an advantage, and any edge, even a slight one, can be rewarded with a spot on the podium.

Racing has traditionally been the cornerstone for research and development of performance parts. That need and desire to go faster and win has stirred the creativity in many an individual and opened their eyes to ways of creating more power, speed, or efficiency from what is many times the simplest concept. Most ideas or theories have to be proven through trial and error. But, in the end, the sacrifice of time and energy (and money) proves it could definitely be worth it.

There is a reason auto and truck builders around the world support racing in one form or another and why they pump money into research and development. Racing is where a lot of new technology is born and where that technology is proven. Many of the advances made in competition will make it into what is driven on the road. The fastest production cars in the world owe much of their performance ability to peoples desire to race and win.

Even the new high-powered diesel pickup trucks on the market today owe much of their torque and power to racers and enthusiasts desires to improve their engines. Manufacturers pay attention to what is being done to the powerplants they produce, and then analyze what works and what doesnt perform as expected.

As more people continue to enjoy the excitement of racing diesels, the more the technology will develop, which will continue to push the industry and racing to new levels. Im waiting to see what the next big step forward is and where it comes from. Never count the little guy out.

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Detonation; Enthusiastic Racing - TruckTrend Network