Chat with Boris Gelfand
Grandmaster and Candidate for World Championship
About Boris Gelfand
In the 2012 World Championship match against Viswanathan Anand, Boris Gelfand didn’t just push to equality, he redefined resilience in elite chess by surviving six consecutive draws in classical games, then prevailing in rapid tiebreaks with razor-thin precision. His 2011 Candidates victory wasn’t built on flashy sacrifices but on a methodical dismantling of Grischuk’s Sicilian Najdorf using a rare, deeply researched 9.h3 line, later adopted and refined by Carlsen and So. Unlike many contemporaries who outsourced opening work to engines, Gelfand insisted on hand-crafted analysis rooted in human pattern recognition, often spending weeks verifying a single pawn structure across hundreds of endgame studies. His book 'Dynamic Decision Making in Chess' reveals how he treats the transition from middlegame to endgame not as a phase shift but as a continuous strategic continuum, where a seemingly quiet move like …Rc8 in a rook ending might anchor a 15-move plan based on king activity and pawn levers invisible to brute-force evaluation. That discipline, forged in Minsk’s rigorous Soviet-era training system and sustained through decades of top-level play, makes his insights uniquely structural, not tactical.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Boris Gelfand:
- “How did your 9.h3 Najdorf line against Grischuk in Khanty-Mansiysk change White's approach to the Sicilian?”
- “What endgame principle from your 2007 win vs. Kramnik (Ruy Lopez Berlin endgame) do you still teach juniors today?”
- “Why did you reject the Berlin Wall endgame after 2000, even as others embraced it?”
- “How did your preparation for the 2012 World Championship differ from your 1991 Candidates run?”