Chesspro Best Games of June 2009

One of the leading Russian chess web-sites www.chesspro.ru has a variety of very interesting chess articles, analysis and columns (it's in Russian but anybody should be able to follow the games quite easily). It also offers a live coverage of the most important chess events. Today I will let you know about the monthly voting for the best game of the month that is run by Maxim Notkin.

Once a month Maxim chooses the most interesting 12-20 games and sends them to GM's with the request to choose their top 10. The game with the top number of GM votes is considered to be the best game of the month. At the end of the year GM's look at the 12 best games of the year and choose the best game of the year. For example here you can find the best games of the year 2008. The top voted game of the year 2008 was a win of Veselin Topalov over Vladimir Kramnik in Wijk-aan-Zee 2008.

You can watch here Maxim's suggestion of 19 best games of June 2009.

Among these 19 games, one is from the higher league of the Russian Women's Championship between Margarita Schepetkova and Svetlana Matveeva. It's very nice, have a look:


You can see the position after the 10th move of Black. It's White to move.

Margarita found a very nice way to continue the game and won in a very convincing style.

Here is the pgn of this game.

Margarita Schepetkova - Svetlana Matveeva

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 Be7 5.e5 Nfd7 6.h4 f6 7.exf6 Nxf6 8.Bd3 0-0 9.Nf3 c5 10.Bxf6 gxf6 11.Ng5 fxg5 12.hxg5 Bxg5 13.Qh5 Rf7 14.Bxh7+ Kf8 15.Bg6 Rg7 16.Rh3 Nd7 17.Rf3+ Bf6 18.0-0-0 cxd4 19.Nxd5 exd5 20.Re1 Qe7 21.Qh8+ Rg8 22.Qh6+ Rg7 23.Rxe7 Kxe7 24.Rxf6 Kxf6 25.Bh5+ 1-0

Out of these 19 best games I proposed the following top-10.

1. Motylev - Gashimov
2. Ivanchuk - Shirov
3. Cheparinov - Caruana
4. Naiditsch - Efimenko
5. Shirov - Nisipeanu
6. Gashimov - Naidistch
7. Shirov - Ivanchuk
8. Shirov - Sutovsky
9. Ding Liren - Ni Hua
10. Tiviakov - Adhiban

Soon ChessPro will publish which one was chosen as the best in June 2009 according to the votes of all the GM's who will take part in this vote.

Posted by: Alexandra Kosteniuk
Women's World Chess Champion
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