“The weak-willed don’t become top chess players”
Mark Glukovsky, editor of 64, the Russian equivalent of New in Chess, responded in a controversial but compulsively readable style to the questions of Crestbook readers.
Karpov on the Pozner show
Anatoly Karpov gave an almost hour-long interview on Russian prime-time television, discussing his candicacy for the position of FIDE President, and much else besides.
Spassky: “I liked that the rook moved in straight lines and ate everything.”
Boris Spassky interviews nowadays always make a nice change of pace, though this one is particularly offbeat – given to a local journalist on the way from a provincial Russian train station to a waiting car (he was returning to the area he was evacuated to from Leningrad during WWII).
Kasparov on ending his work with Carlsen
While Garry Kasparov was in Georgia he gave an interview which extratime.az claim is the first to the Azerbaijan media in 20 years. It was one of the first public statements after the news that Kasparov had stopped training Carlsen provoked much speculation.
Gashimov at Crestbook
Vugar Gashimov recently gave an interesting interview at Crestbook. He goes into detail on what happened at the end of the World Team Championship in Turkey, where quick draws with the US left the Azerbaijan team without medals.
Chesspro game-of-the-month scandal? :)
The voting in Chesspro’s January game of the month was unusual enough to invite tongue-in-cheek comparison to a voting scandal from the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Final interviews from Linares
Vasiliev’s final report on Linares 2010 was a bumper round-up of interviews with the participants, including Topalov’s pyramid theory of why he should only play for large amounts of money.
Online game commentary ends on cosmic note
In the Topalov-Aronian game at Linares Topalov missed a beautiful, hard-to-see but not hard-to-calculate, combination. His previous good luck combined with Aronian’s previous bad lack inspired a remarkable summary from one commentator.
Aronian and the Benoni
In the early rounds of Linares Aronian had promising positions but failed to collect any full points. That didn’t stop him providing good quotes for Vasiliev at Chesspro.
