Word: kramnik
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...Vladimir Kramnik made the worst blunder of his career and arguably the biggest error ever made by a world chess champion. He lost a knight in a one-move combination on the thirty-fourth move and resigned immediately. It was Deep Fritz's first victory. Although the silicon beast still trails in the eight-game match two games to three, the momentum is now clearly in its favor. Kramnik's play was shaky in the previous game, and here it was unrecognizable. "He had a total hallucination," commented William Paschall, an international master in Massachusetts. "There is just no other...
...queen pawn two squares. This normally leads to quieter positions than the advance of the king pawn, which the machine had preferred in the earlier games. In the resulting opening, called the Queen's Gambit Declined, Fritz emerged with a slight advantage and kept the champion under pressure. Kramnik tried to exchange queens to simplify the position, a strategy that had previously served him well. But the machine slyly avoided the exchange and headed toward an endgame where it would have had one more pawn than Kramnik, who would be relegated to a long, tortuous defense to achieve a draw...
...After the game, a dejected Kramnik did his best to appear unfazed. "I do not blunder often," he told the spectators. "It's not a big problem. I just need to be more concentrated. Such things can happen any time." He conceded that he was tired. "We will go back to the hotel," he said, "and reconsider our approach...
...grand masters who were watching said that it may be psychologically difficult for him to recover from such a colossal mistake. In the next game, they said, he'll waste time and energy second-guessing even obvious moves. Although Kramnik hung himself in this game, the machine deserves credit for putting him under so much stress that he collapsed. "Nobody sets up stuff like that Vampire," said Russian grand master Peter Svidler...
Meanwhile, the road show rolls on to Dubai, where FIDE's World Chess Grand Prix kicks off April 2. Of course, the top three active players won't be there; Kasparov, Kramnik and Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand will be at an independent tournament in Kazakhstan. "You've almost got a situation like in boxing," says Seirawan with a sigh. "Speaking as a member of the chess world, it's extremely undignified...