10 Games from 2013

Hello everyone, continuing the format of the “Top 10 list” I present to you 10 games from 2013. I had trouble creating a title for this page because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say about these games: are these the best games from 2013? Are these the most memorable games from 2013? Tough questions, but I intend on presenting important and interesting games that were played in 2013. It took some time to go through every (major) tournament that was played this year (as you can imagine). I compiled my list with help from chessgames.com. By looking at the comments of particular games I was able to deduce the importance of the game. I then took my findings and examined GM Joel Benjamin’s game of the week on ICC.

It then occurred to me that likely the majority of the games I would find at the top of my list (the most discussed games on chessgames.com) would likely be played by Carlsen (due to his popularity, and annoying “fanboys”). It would be fairly easy to compile a top ten list of Carlsen’s games for 2013; but this is a list for everybody who played in 2013 (regardless of whether or not you’ve heard of them). Many of the games that had the most comments weren’t really anything special (see the world championship). With that in mind I had to choose only the best Carlsen games; not just the most popular.

I initially started with 290 total games. This list was narrowed down to 81 games. Of those 81 I chose the most talked about and the most interesting (to me obviously). As a side note, I only chose games that were decisive, although draws can be very interesting the list needed to be narrowed down somehow. For the actual games I decided to try to display games that were exemplary of a particular persons style (ie. Carlsen’s fantastic endings, or Topalov’s wild tactics).

Here’s how this list is broken down:

• 1 win from each of the following (19.4% of total games):
  • Carlsen – 44 games on my list (7.87% of total games)
  • Kramnik – 35 games (6.26% of total games)
  • Nakamura – 28 games (5.01% of total games)
• 2 Games from the following group (21.6% of total games):
  • Caruana – 24 games
  • Anand – 22 games
  • Aronian – 19 games
  • Gelfand – 19 games
  • Topalov – 19 games
  • Karjakin – 18 games
• 1 Game from the following group (11.45% of total):
  • Kamsky – 15 games
  • Mamedyarov – 13 games
  • Grischuk – 12 games
  • Ivanchuk – 12 games
  • Vachier-Lagrave – 12 games
• 1 Game from the following group (13.06% of total):
  • Hao – 11 games
  • Svidler – 11 games
  • Morozevich – 10 games
  • Giri – 8 games
  • Adams – 7 games
  • Liren – 7 games
  • Tomashevsky – 7 games
  • Andreikin – 6 games
  • Short – 6 games
• 3 Games from the following group (34.7% of total):
  • Karpov!? – 5 games
  • Nepomniachtchi – 5 games
  • Ponomariov – 5 games
  • Robson – 5 games
  • Wei Yi – 5 games
  • and a bunch others who are too numerous to name