Two days ago Bulgarian Vesselin Topalov, grand chess master and former world champion, made a brilliant game against his old rival, Vladimir Kramnik.
You can see the whole game here, with comments.
The man is a walking genius, and even the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung admits it, with a picture on the first page (the newspaper is actually one of the big serious newspapers in Germany, and chess is not their national game), and a question mark after his 12th move. As the commentators say, “Very fast sacrifice! We blinked and Topalov had already sacrificed a figure!…..”
No wonder world champion Gari Kasparov names “the greatest game in his life” a game against Vesselin Topalov, in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. It is worldwide known as the “Kasparov’s Immortal”. You can see it here (Topalov lost this one in 1999, but perhaps that was why he became later world champion, and the grand master with the highest ELO at some point)
Vesselin Topalov is really a phenomenal player!
____
credits for the picture from FAZ: I.E.Stankov – a Bulgarian student in Germany