Absolutely brilliant game and thanks for annotating it for us.

Wow, i thought i was watching Mikhail Tal himself!!!

wow! enough said...

Nice to hear you again
1,5 out of 7 against that sort of opponnents doesnt sound too bad (for me ^^)
Cheer up, Zibby ! (*cough cough* I wont call you that again, I promise. =P )

Great stuff Zibbit. The most instructive thing for me was perhaps the use of pawns to forcefully break open lines. In most of those attacking positions where Aronian very precisely advances his d and e pawns, I was initially much more tempted by knight or rook moves which on deeper analysis didn't really do anything. As you showed, the attack seemed to come from all corners of the board. That's also the extraordinary thing: the use of the full geometry of the open lines and diagonals, so that the king can't even run to the queenside, as it looks like he may be able to do at first because of the queenside pawn majority. But white has so much delicate queen/rook interaction that it can't be done. It also showed for me how two knights can be rather weak defensive pieces around the king sometimes: it seemed difficult for Volokitin to coordinate them effectively to block those files. "Giving up" the black-squared bishop in the middle-game was also an amazing move by Aronian: not one I would ever have found, even after the half-hour of reflection. That bishop cutting across into the kingside looked so powerful that it initially didn't seem wise to let it go to consolidate the center. But as you say, the rooks become too strong, the white center holds, and the attack can just grind on over on the kingside. Brilliant play! Thanks.

Absolutely fantastic game!! I was watching the world championship match and some kibbitzers were talking about this game too, now I understand why!

Oh and even though you didn't perform so well, according to yourself, still congrats on participating in the ECC: there are worse competitions around .

What a game!! The way material was flung at black there, 2 white pieces hanging and 2 pawns down then a piece sacrifice! And another!! This was just mind blowing. This has to go down as one of the greatest attacking games for a long while. Thx ingvar.

KB

I really liked the hehe at the very end!

Whoa. As Katar said, brilliant game, I enjoyed it even more for having you comment.

g4 struck me as an interesting move that I might be able to pull off over the board. e4, e5, offering the bishop- don't think I'm there yet, heheh.

I did see Ng5 before e4 was played. I was happy to see it played correctly later.

Thanks for the video. I'll probably watch the tactics one tomorrow or the next day, I've been saving it ;D

Thanks for the comments guys. Glad you enjoyed the game, clearly this game makes a great impression and if I stumble on such brilliant contemporary games I will try and share them as well!

Very nice game! Thanks Zibbit.

You might want to take a look at Ivansevic vs Aronian in the chess olympiad round 10.

thank you

Yeah just looked at this game again, so many stunning moves in this game!