Women's World Chess Championship 2013: Ushenina's Loss to Yifan due to bad Time management, says Second Khalifman

Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hi everyone, 

The self-destruction of Anna Ushenina at the Women's World Chess Champion Hou Yifan has been a big disappointment for the Ukrainian Grandmasters' fans. In an interview to Anastasiya Karlovich, one of Ushenina's seconds, Grandmaster Alexander Khalifman blames time management for the major problems.

Anastasiya Karlovich: It remains a mystery for many people still what happened to Anna Ushenina in the Women’s World Championship Match. Please tell us about it. What were the reasons for her defeat?
Alexander Khalifman: We realized that Yifan was the favourite, yet the match was not hopeless. Anna has some weak points, but we thought Anna would be able to keep the balance. Well, what to say, just everything started to fall apart, from the very first game, and it continued later on. It is difficult to estimate what happened. Whether Anna was not psychologically ready for the level of pressure, or something else, but there was one obvious problem she could not solve till the end - her time management. One should not spend so much time! She should have done something with that during the match. 

Actually we should have tried to work on it before the match. I feel it was my fault as well. It became crucial when Yifan. having so many pluses already, could also add such an advantage as Anna’s time troubles in each game. 

And then the third game was played. It was absolutely a terrible day! It is unclear what happened on that day. And yet, the real critical moment in the match was in the fifth game. It was the most important, the most decisive and actually the final one.
If Anna would have taken that unfortunate pawn on h4, I think she would have won this game. We could see that Hou Yifan felt uncomfortable at this point and the time was equal - a rare case during the match. The score could have been 2-3 and Anna could have taken the psychological initiative. The match could have started from the beginning. Of course it's silly to say that Anna would have been the favorite.

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