In mutual time trouble in a crazy position Dominguez gave Shirov a chance to land a winning blow – and tie for first place in the tournament. But with seconds remaining Shirov agreed to a draw.

Originally posted here.

This is what Shirov had to say to Chesspro after the game (though I wonder if he had some less publishable thoughts immediately afterwards!): 

– Alexey, after your phenomenal start you finished with some fatal blunders…

– Well, at the start of the tournament I was a bit lucky, my wins in the 4th and 5th rounds weren’t entirely deserved. And in the second half it was the opposite, at times I should have got more, so that the final result was probably fair.

– Today against Dominguez you could win in one move…

– Well yes, but I had to see the move. I had 10 seconds left when I agreed to a draw…

– The monitor showed 2 seconds…

– No, it was 10 all the same. While I was accepting the seconds continued to count down. The 31. b4! idea isn’t that obvious. I was looking at the more direct moves 31. Qc6, 31. Qh5. I’m also better there but I just wasn’t sure. It was impossible to calculate everything in the seconds remaining and it seemed to me that continuing the game would have been like betting on red or black, and so I decided not to continue it.

– And against Anand you could have won with 39…Ng3

– I didn’t see that move either. I saw another move which led to a draw, but I didn’t see that it led to a draw… Overall I missed quite a lot here.

– But you performed well, all the same.

– That’s what surprises me more than anything. It’s a paradox.

– What are your plans for the near future?

– For now I don’t have any particular plans as I don’t have any invitations. I hope that the decent result here will lead to some invitations and I’ll manage to play in some other good tournaments. I’ll play in the Bundesliga, one weekend in February, March and April.

– What do you think about Carlsen?

– No doubt the way he played he could have picked up more points, taking into account his advantage in the game with Kramnik…

– Advantage? But Kramnik said that it was one-way traffic…

– In the given situation I don’t assess games according to reports but according to computer evaluations. And they say that Carlsen was “better”. So you can consider that he was unlucky.

– It’s hard to imagine modern chess without computers. They’ve totally changed our impression of the game, haven’t they?

– It’s still the human being who makes the final assessment. The computer is a long way from always correctly evaluating this or that concrete position. You can carry a variation on for five moves and the computer evaluation changes. But it’s clear that we can no longer judge what’s really happening without a computer, if we want to be objective.

– The advent of computers in chess has taken away the charm…

– But then you know much more about chess than when you started to study it, and you want to understand the secret of the game. And thanks to computers we’re getting closer to answering those very old questions. I mean that for me the arrival of computers in chess hasn’t made it any less interesting. The only annoying things is that you have to spend a lot of time working with them.