Reading about this game on the Internet, I feel like I was watching an entirely different game than everybody else. At the time Nakamura played 115... f5, SF was literally two moves away from breaking open the kingside by Re3 followed by g4, a maneuver it had slowly been preparing over the last dozen moves or so. Would it have been better to defend passively than playing f5? Quite possibly, but given the circumstances, f5 seems like a very reasonable move to play to me. When you are exhausted after more than 100 moves of play, you are beginning to run short on time, you are faced with a superficially scary-looking idea like this (even if it isn't theoretically dangerous -- not having analysed the position, I don't really know), and the computer program you use to assist you in analysing the position believes that the attack you fear is indeed dangerous, it is perfectly natural to panic and think you need to get some counterplay before it's too late.syzygy wrote:Sure, but certainly in game 2 it seems pretty clear at which move he decides to go for a win instead of contenting himself with a draw. It might be that SF would have found some way to break open the position before reaching a 50-move draw, but I kind of doubt it.
Nakamura himself (on Twitter) seems to be the only one who shared my feelings about the position:
It is also notable (from the same Twitter discussion) that while everybody else likes to criticise SF's play in the second game, Nakamura appears to be more critical about the first game:Hikaru Nakamura wrote:Rybka was saying that in the 2nd game if I did not go f5, white goes Re3 and g4 with an advantage of 0.9. Clearly, Stockfish is better.
Hikaru Nakamura wrote:Stockfish like all computers is a great defender, but it made a few positional errors especially in game 1 albeit it not serious.