The great Anand’s little ideas – part I
Grandmaster Radosław Wojtaszek, one of Viswanathan Anand’s seconds in Sofia, annotated the games from the recent World Championship Match for the Polish “Mat” chess magazine.
Karpov proposes holding Candidates Matches in Kiev
Anatoly Karpov, former World Chess Champion and candidate for the post of FIDE President, is proposing switching the Candidates Matches from Kazan, Russia, to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
“The Russian player we played a match against in 2006 in Elista doesn’t exist for us!”
Yury Vasiliev of Sport Express broke the news yesterday that Veselin Topalov would, after all, be willing to play Candidates Matches in Russia. Today, in the full version of the interview, Silvio Danailov goes into much greater detail on his feelings towards Kramnik, his disapproval of FIDE’s conduct during the match in Sofia, and the upcoming matches and Olympiad.
Candidates Matches once more in turmoil
In a bolt from the blue, the Kommersant newspaper reports that the Russian Chess Federation is lobbying to have the 2011 Candidates Matches switched from Baku, in Azerbaijan, to Kazan, in Russia. Veselin Topalov has joined the fray by refusing to play in Russia.
Aronian: I won’t travel to Baku
On the final day of the World Championship match in Sofia, Levon Aronian was interviewed in Armenia by Vadim Mkrtchian of “Golos Armenii” (“Voice of Armenia”). The interview includes Levon’s view on the match, the FIDE election, opening preparation, and his reasons for not wanting to play candidates matches in Baku.
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.
Aronian’s chess idols
Aronian was asked to name his chess idols by the 1news.az website, and came up with a surprise or two.
Kramnik: “One of the toughest games of my whole life”
The Chesspro report on rounds 5 and 6 of the Tal Memorial in Moscow included Kramnik’s reflections on his hard-fought victory over Ponomariov.
