Chess Weekly

Brissago (SUI), 29.01.2004
Kramnik vs German Team Simultaneous

The Swiss tobacco company Dannemann sponsored the event; they also that the Classical Chess World Championship between Vladimir Kramnik and Peter Leko will be staged from September 25 to October 18, at a still to be disclosed location. Certainly, Kramnik had to outplay the German team in order to rehabilitate his reputation somehow after his rather unsuccessful play in Wijk aan Zee and to sooth the sponsors. He successfully accomplished this task by winning one game and drawing three others. During the games it might appear that the final score 2.5 - 1.5 could have been even greater in Kramnik's favor. The Russian champion did not experience any problems in a single game - neither the positional ones, nor the time pressure ones. The time control was 2 hours 40 minutes per 40 moves for Kramnik, 1 hour 20 minutes added after his move 40, and 2 hours 40 minutes, 1 hour added for his opponents.
Lutz chose Ruy Lopez with white pieces and emerged from the opening with a slightly worse position. He had to look for survival in an opposite colored bishops endgame being a pawn down and luckily for him the endgame turned out to be drawn indeed. Rustem Dautov gradually equalized play with black pieces in a reliable variation of the Petrov defense, which is seldom played nowadays for some obscure reasons.
In the following game it might seem after White's move 17 that Kramnik was to deliver his first blow.
[Kramnik-Bischoff]
In order to win the simultan, Kramnik had to outplay the veteran Dr. Huebner with black pieces. Robert Huebner, who rarely plays in the recent times, yielded to pressure at some moment and captured a 'poisoned' pawn, which allowed further development of activity on Kramnik's part…
[Huebner-Kramnik]