I still think this is an instructive position.
I'd have no problem showing this too my lads. Weaker players need all the help they can when defending themselves.

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There will have been some lads on here wondering why not Nf6+ and Bb2.

Short and Kasparov just glided past it and went for Kg7 concentrating on Bb2 and the discovered checks. They got here when waiting for Giri to play his 16th move.

Kh8 is a plausible trick which had to seen coming, perhaps Giri was leading Carlsen towards it with his big think on move 16.

It's the kind of move we punters (present company accepted) would never take into consideration as White when going for this line.

Infact I'd go as far to say if I was White here.

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I would have flicked out Nf6+ and then right away would see he has Kh8. (and then hope he would not see it.)

This is chess evolving right infront of your eyes.

"Wouldn't have preferred any other outcome. Sacrifices shouldn't be made unless they are completely sound."

This one was not unsound.

Have not seen anyone come up with a better line of play for Giri, infact just how well he held it together.

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You have more faith in my brain!

I think what is interesting is the "human view" of a game. There are some positions for sure when the computer view so to speak is better but chess players forget that at the board they are playing in imperfect conditions (so to say a sacrifice "should always be sound" is in fact stupid. A sacrifice, a true one is in fact often a kind of intuitice speculation and can lead to an unclear position.

I saw a video of one of the KK W Chps matches where Kasparov got quite excited not because he had seen the moves but because as he kept repeating (a Q sac against Karpov's) "I didn't calculate it! I didn't calculate it!" What he was excited about was that he had used judgment that he had superior forces leading to a win.

Now of course that is rare and his judgement calculation in chess was phemomenal and mostly it was complete and very ingenious and accurate.

I suppose it's a bit cheap like cop bashing by radicals but I thought it might be amusing. Sally Simpson started it though!

It is strange being subject to US Law though. There is a kind of US-Centrism which I suppose is the way GB was in the hay day of it's Empire. Ironically two men, not citizens of such major (or "powerful") nations, were battling it out in chessland. The CounterPunch journal looks interesting. It is hard to predict how these various schemes of nations such as China, the US, Russia and even France: how their actions or plans will pan out. Mostly history consigns all these plots and plans to the eternal dustbin...

But there is a lot of bad stuff going down for sure. The thing I was thinking about came from a US sitcom. A woman (in some family crisis) suggests they all have a cup of tea and the grumpy husband snaps:

"Tea!? Tea!? We bomb countries where they have tea."!

A Rook on the seventh, a pawn on the seventh and active pieces for a mere exchange.>

I think we are agreeing. Though I never think in terms of pawns when judging piece activity.

Thinking that a Rook on the 7th is worth a pawn is alien to me.

Rooks on the 7th conjure up all kinds of tactical ideas and pawns on the 7th opens the door to pawn-promo-combo's.

Once you strip away all the fancy and flowery terms to describe a game of chess - 'deep positional play...' what does that mean? You will find that the object of the game has never changed. It is to Checkmate the other player.

Never seen a 'deep positional' checkmate. I'll keep looking.

Chess moves, rules, and principles don't change and the exchange sac idea would have been given serious thought by any top master from any era in chess history. Morphy would have done that exchange sac in a jiffy if the position occurred in one of his games. It always puzzles me why some kibitzers trying to shoehorn chess 'evolution' claim only active masters can comprehend such sacs.

Well you can go back to the start of the commentary and see that a tongue-in-cheek comment.

You are right there is not such a huge difference. Morphy had weaker opponenents. But he would still have played much as Carlsen and or Caruana. He also played excellent endings and "positional" games.

Karpov and Kasparov played such sacs as of course did Petrosian but any strong GM such as Rubinstein or Fischer would play such things. There are increases in opening theory knowledge etc but the real strength of Carlsen et al is in their overall ability and knowledge. Looking now at Boguljubov-Alekhine and most of the games showed Bogol as playing the better chess then letting things slip due to time pressure so that Alekhine (in the second match) is seen not as some ferocious "genius" but as not really playing much better than Bogoljubov. In one game that B missed a certain win the next day Alekhine won with a slightly dodgy line that played on B's tendency to think too long and the fact that he had lost the previous game.

So what makes such as Alekhine et al so "great"? It seems to be not the "brilliance" but a greater use of 'accountancy' (making sure overall that there are as few errors as possible - and such things as psychology (towards the opponent but also in management of time etc): so young GMs at the top level tend overall to manage their time efficiently.