HemmersChess

Five rounds have been played at the British Championship, and top seeded player Michael Adams is the only one left with a perfect score. Nicholas Pert, Daniel Gormally, Jovanka Houska and Adam Hunt are trailing by a full point.

The event’s full name is the “97th British Championships of the British Isles”, and it takes place 25 July to 7 August at the Sports Centre of the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

The main event is an 11-round Swiss with a possible play-off in the case of a tie for first place. There are several side events, such as senior and junior championships, rapidplay and a weekender.

The rate of play in the main event is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the remaining moves with 30 seconds increment from move 1. The first prize is £5,000 (6,013 Euros). The games start at 14.15 local time, 15.15 CET. The games are transmitted live with a five-minute delay and can be followed with expert commentary. Here are the links:

• Live Commentary: Andrew Martin & guests
• Webcam

Top seed and absolute favourite Michael Adams is still on a perfect score after five rounds, but will meet tougher competition in the remaining six rounds. Thus far the Englishman defeated FM Robert Eames (2287), GM Aaron Summerscale (2428), IM Richard Pert (2460), IM Jack Rudd (2236) and FM Alexei Slavin (2417) relatively easily.

Selection of games rounds 1-5

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Adams-Slavin in round 5 of the British Championship

Commentary with IM Andrew Martin, followed by many fans off and on line through Livestream

Photos © British Championship

Links

• Official website
• Games in PGN via TWIC

Which side stands better? How much better? Why? We received new stock of Elements of Positional Evaluation.

In this 216-pages book (only € 18.95!) author Dan Heisman teaches how to recognize the various factors that determine the value of your pieces on the board.

Heisman added over 100 new examples to this 4th edition

Contrary to what was expressed in an open letter last week, Veselin Topalov is, after all, willing to play Candidates Matches in Russia. However, he is “refusing to play a match with a Russian player in Russia, if that match is connected to the title struggle,” his manager Silvio Danailov said in an interview with Sport Express this week.

Last week in an open letter Veselin Topalov declared that he wouldn’t “participate in any stage of the cycle for the World Chess Title that takes place in Russia, in order to avoid problems and conflicts that already took place there”. The former world’s number one anticipated FIDE’s decision to move the Candidates Matches, scheduled for March-April 2011, from Baku, Azerbaijan to Kazan, Russia. FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov’s reaction to Topalov’s open letter was that he would send the Bulgarian a letter ?asking not to take hasty decisions?.

In an interview with Sport Express, his manager Silvio Danailov has now stated that Topalov is, after all, willing to play in Russia.

You should read his letter more carefully. It doesn?t say that Topalov refuses to play in Russia. He?ll go to Khanty-Mansiysk for the Olympiad and will represent Bulgaria on board one. Topalov is refusing to play a match with a Russian player in Russia, if that match is connected to the title struggle. The chances of Topalov meeting a Russian player in Kazan aren?t high as for that they?d both need to get to the final, though it?s a possibility.

In the interview, translated at Chess in Translation, Danailov doesn’t mention the name of Vladimir Kramnik, who is the only Russian player who qualified for the Candidates Matches.

The Russian player we played a match against in 2006 in Elista doesn?t exist for us!

Danailov also talks about the World Championship match in Sofia between Anand and Topalov, and once again reacts sharply to the happenings surrounding the vulcano eruption and Georgios Makropoulos’ decision to postpone the first game one day.

Links

• Original Sport Express interview
• Translation into English

Fabiano Caruana won the Young Grandmaster Tournament in Biel today. The Italian was the strongest in a necessary play-off with Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, whom he beat in the final.

The play-off final between Fabiano Caruana and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son

The Young Grandmaster Tournament was part of the Biel Chess Festival in Switzerland, which takes place July 17-30. Anish Giri, David Howell, Fabiano Caruana, Maxim Rodshtein, Parimarjan Negi, Dmitry Andreikin, Evgeny Tomashevsky, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Wesley So and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son played.

Round 9 & play-off

As leaders Caruana and Vachier-Lagrave drew in the last round, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son was able to catch the two in the standings by beating Giri. In fact the Vietnamese finished first on tiebreak. As regulations dictated, on Thursday morning a rapid play-off was played between the players who finished on shared 1st place. It was decided that the numbers 2 and 3 played each other and the winner would play Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son.

But first things first: the final round on Wednesday. From a quiet King’s Indian Attack, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son slowly outplayed Anish Giri, who might regret his 17th move (e.g. 17…Rfe8 looks close to equal). After a forced sequence of moves an ending was reached where White had more than enough compensation for the pawn.

Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son-Anish Giri
Biel 2010

Position after 28.Rxb7.

The Vietnamese continued to play strongly and although Black might have been able to hold the draw, the win seemed fully deserved.

Rodshtein must have missed a win somehere against Tomashevsky. Both 37.Qd4! and 40.Ne4! seem to lead to a decisive advantage. Andreikin reached equality remarkably easily against So, using the Old Indian. The ending was soon better for Black thanks to his superior knight, but it was never winning. Caruana and Vachier-Lagrave drew relatively quickly to secure the rapid play-off.

Play-off

And so we come to this morning’s action. Caruana and Vachier-Lagrave first both won one rapid game (10 minutes & 10 seconds increment) with the white pieces. What exactly happened in the first game is not yet clear to us – was one more move played (Bxg3) and did the Frenchman touch his queen? It’s more likely that the game was saved incompletely. In any case, he recovered well and won a nice, tactical ending to level the score.

Vachier-Lagrave continued strongly, and reached a promising position again with the white pieces in the Armageddon blitz game.

Vachier-Lagrave-Caruana
Biel 2010

Here 38.Rb2?! allowed 38…Qa4! and the tables turned, as …Qd1 and Ra1 cannot be prevented. White should still be able to hold it, but the defence proved too difficult.

Caruana had an even narrower escape in the first game of the final against Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son, as he defended an ending two pawns down to a draw. In the second game he struck decisively.

Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son-Caruana
Biel 2010

Here 30.Rc2 should draw. 30.b3?! was answered by the strong 30…a3! and after 31.Ra8 Ra5 32.Rxa5 bxa5 33.Nd4 Nb4 34.Nb5 Nxa2 35.Nxa3 Nc1 Black won a pawn, which was, like in almost any knight ending, decisive.

Games rounds 9 & tiebreak

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Fabiano Caruana with the winner's medal in Biel

Links

• Official website
• Games in PGN: Young GMs, Tiebreak via TWIC

Being a database programmer, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when I recently dreamt I had to develop a chess database. But it wasn’t an ordinary chess database.

Carceri XIV – Giovanni Battista Piranesi

I was told by a faceless person to make a chess database of all chess games ever played. If that doesn’t sound like much, it’s because that was not all. The man told me it must also contain all chess analyses ever made, as well as every comment, opinion or text ever written about any move. It would be a database of all existing chess knowledge -an endless chess library. It was like making the chess version of Jorge Luis Borges’ Total Library. The ultimate Mega Database – an entire chess universe.

I started by collecting all existing chess books ever written – both ancient manuscripts and newly printed books. I visited all chess libraries in the world and went through all privately owned chess book collections. But this clearly wasn’t enough. I had to visit every chess player in person to ask for any scoresheets of games that they had in their possession. Then, I went through all local club magazines and internet blogs to find games I missed. This reminded me that I had to get all chess magazines as well. And, of course, I downloaded all digital books, DVD’s, game analyses and instruction guides on chess.

When I had rubricized all material and put it in a more or less logical order, I started thinking about how to put everything in a database. It didn’t take me long to realize I wouldn’t be able to use existing chess database software. It would just be too impractical. For 1.e4 alone, hundreds if not thousands of comments somehow had to be entered in the database, and this can’t be done with a regular database program. While it is possible to add comments in different languages in some software, you can’t add comments by different sources – at least not dynamically.

So I started thinking about how to develop this chess database myself. Basically it had to contain many more dimensions than the current ones – in fact, it had to have an infinite amount of possible entries for comments and analyses. All published praise of 47…Bh3!! and 23…Qg3!! had to be entered into the database somehow. Actually, it should also be possible to add multiple annotation symbols, because perhaps some commentators had awarded these moves not with two, but only with one exclamation mark (a grave sin, I must say). The database design must take this into account as well.

With the help of data warehouse design techniques, I was able to establish which dimensions my database should have. Obviously there should be dimensions with information about the sources (the books themselves), and information related to the games, or game fragments. This could be players’ names, the year in which it was played, where it was played, and so on. The moves and sub variations (including move number, to keep track of things) should be stored in a different dimension (or, in its technical term, a ‘fact table’. Any game, including its sub-lines, could develop like a garden of forking paths, leading to an infinite amount of moves.

'Datavault' model of a data warehouse

The same was obviously true of comments. But there was an additional problem: comments could not only be related to moves, but also to people who had written them. in his books, Kasparov often refers to older authors, for example. At this point in my dream, my faceless principal interrupted my musings. He ordered me to also store all information about the people who had written the annotations: what use would the project otherwise be? This implied I had to include all biographies of chess commentators in my database. And of course, the commentators could also be chess players themselves, so they should also be linked back to the players and games dimensions.

When I had finished my design – or at least thought I had – a long-feared question arose in my head: where to start? Which data should be put into the database first? Would it be wise to work ‘backwards’ in time, starting with the most recent chess books and adding entries in the database for every name, move or comment that returned a blank? Wouldn’t it be wiser to start with the first chess manuscripts – the recent reconstruction of Francesch Vicent’s mysterious treatise, the surviving games of Ruy Lopez, or perhaps even the first ancient Arab chess problems?

In the end, I decided it wouldn’t really matter – it was a Sisyphus job in any case – and so I started with a game collection from 2010. It happened to be a new book on Capablanca. Slowly but steadily I worked my way back. Then I realized I had forgotten something crucial. Within comments, there could also be references to other works – references to database entries that didn’t exist in my digital library yet! I was suddenly faced with what is sometimes called ‘orphans’ – database references that can’t be traced back (anymore) to their primary dimension. In order to proceed, I had to put all titles in the system first. And so I started again.

My success didn’t last long. I soon found out that many chess authors use references to non-chess related literature all the time. Kasparov quotes Ilf & Petrov, Donner quotes Nietzsche. Once you start paying attention to it, chess and literature are completely intertwined. To be complete, the entire world literature should be included in the list as well. And that’s only the beginning of a myriad of problems. For instance, how to deal with references to literature that has been lost over the centuries?

I now realized the entire Total Chess Library idea would be quite pointless without having access to each and every chess book ever written; every game or analysis – including those that have been destroyed, mutilated, lost for good. I was trapped in a labyrinth I had created myself.

Then I woke up, of course. While I cycled to work, I thought about what use such a megalomanic project could be. Nobody would ever be able to use this monstrous database. The information would be sitting there in some kind of super computer without anyone ever touching it. At first I felt anger, then sadness. Then I felt like nothing had really changed. It was just like work.

As I switched on my laptop at work and opened the data warehouse environment I was currently working on, I remembered the words from another Borges story, The Library of Babel:

At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries — the origin of the Library and of time — might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars.

For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons … There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words.

Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.

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Highly regarded chess teacher GM Nigel Davies examines the methods used by a number of club players to improve their game. He studied his own students and shows how any player can improve when given the right guidance. Davies tackles all areas of the game.

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Due to financial problems and organizational failure by the German Chess Federation, the four German top players won’t play at the upcoming Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk. This is what Arkadij Naiditsch tries to make clear in an angry open letter which he sent to ChessVibes. The German top grandmaster doesn’t mince words.

Open letter by GM Arkadij Naiditsch

Why the German A-team will not participate in the 2010 Olympiad

Cc: Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker

This letter is not addressed to anybody directly. As a player of the German National team I would like to make some things clear about my hard working Federation and its President, Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker.
Let?s start with the fact that nobody from the German A-team is going to participate in the Chess Olympiad this year. These players are Georg Meier, Jan Gustafsson, Daniel Fridman and me, Arkadij Naiditsch. Why? The easy answer is that the biggest chess federation in Europe, about 100,000 active members, couldn?t manage to find money to pay the players.

So, the next question is ?how could this happen?? This question is easy to answer as well: nobody in the federation has been doing anything for at least five years. The German Chess Federation has no sponsors at the moment, so the money is only coming from their members. Generally, even this should be enough to have a great and lazy life, but the main problem is the meetings attended by huge amounts of hungry officials that are being held almost monthly in expensive hotels.

Let me now become a bit more direct, because I would like to single out a few people with whom I have had to deal with personally.

1) Mr. U. Bönsch – National Coach
The first Olympiad that I played in was in Turin, 2006. I played on the first board for the German team and Mr. Bönsch was already an experienced and well-respected trainer. But the strange thing was, all he ever did was distribute the line-up for the next match and make a great black tea that we drank together every evening. Not once did he make the slightest effort to help anybody from the team chess wise.

So, year after year, the chess help from Mr. Bönsch remained the same: nothing but tea. In my opinion, our national trainer could be a hero in any teahouse!

2) Mr. Klaus Deventer – responsible for finding and distributing money for the national team. In German: Leistungssportreferent.
With regard to finding money there isn?t much to say. I think Mr. Deventer in his crushing career in the Chess Federation never even gave it a try.

In distributing money for the national team he has clear methods and opinions. That is, the national team should play for free!! By the way, to be clearer, Mr. Deventer is the individual who is responsible for fighting for us to get money. So, from a 110,000 Euro budget he manages for ?top chess? in Germany, less than a quarter is left for the Olympiad for male and female teams combined.

Strangely, Mr. Deventer is a very important man in the federation. Personally, I could never understand what he is actually doing. And I think after many years of deep thinking, I finally got a little clue about his function; it is to try to stop anybody from being a professional chess player in Germany. Mr. Deventer really hates this. Rarely it is possible to meet somebody as unpleasant as Mr. Deventer.

3) Mr. Ralph Alt – Tournament Director
Mr. Alt is a famous public prosecutor in Germany. He is the organizer of many official tournaments in Germany, such as the National Individual Championship.

He only has one problem: he is always scheduling these championships to match his holidays. So, sometimes he gets lucky and there is nothing running at the same time. No such luck this year. He held the German National Championship at exactly the same dates as the European Individual Championships. A normal reaction would be, what the heck? Easy answer: Sorry, holidays are holidays. Can?t move them! So nobody participated in it from the A-team and the young German player Niclas Huschenbeth managed to win the title. Congrats to him as he showed great fighting spirit in the tournament.

My last German Championship was in 2007. In that year Mr. Alt showed absolute class. He found a city in Germany that has no train or bus (or anything else) connection. So taxi was the only way to reach it. Respect for Mr. Alt!! This is really not so easy to do. Give it a try.

4) Mr. Jörg Schulz – fifteen different positions!!
Personally, I didn?t have much to do with Mr. Schulz as he has always been responsible for the German Youth Chess Federation. (Deutsche Schach Jugend). Slowly, over the years he took over about fifteen different positions within the federation and is almost completely in charge of the whole money flow now. Bravo to Mr. Schulz!

For example, he created a chess company that is paying the players for participating in the European Team Championships as well as Olympiads. The company is making no money but paying us. Wow, really great job by Mr. Schulz.

That?s all from the main German Federation Crushers! There might be few more that I don?t know, but they are probably in hiding.

About Mr. Prof. Dr. Robert von Weizsäcker I will write a bit down below. First you will have to read his great letter that he wrote to the four of us (German A-team). For other people in the Federation, there are so many that deserve a few choice words, but I think it wouldn?t be fair to the few people who are trying to do something for German chess. Anyway, my many thanks to these few.

Dear readers, I hope you now have a bit of an overview of what is going on in my Federation.

This year, the A-team has said that we will not play for the funny money they are offering and asked for conditions. It drove almost all the guys in the Federation completely crazy! How is it possible that we will not play?? Do we have to cancel now a few dinners? No way we gonna do that!!?

Mr. Deventer immediately wrote a very long and boring letter, where he is comparing us with soccer players and asking us to play almost for free because the German National Soccer team is also not getting their normal salary for going to Africa. Funny, no? I guess then we have to compare Mr. Deventer to a Russian oligarch and ask him to support us from his own budget?!

Afterwards, we half-heartedly attempted to find sponsors ourselves, which didn?t work out. So the result was, of course, that the German A-team is not going to play the 2010 Chess Olympiad.

This is when Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker is coming into the game (he has been the German Chess President for the last two years).

So far, according to the words of Jan Gustafsson (all the contact was going through him) our President supported us, the players.

But on June 29th we received a letter from Prof. Dr. Robert von Weizsäcker that completely shocked me. Up to that point my opinion of our President was quite positive; he seemed to be a man with an understanding of chess players.

Here is the letter [translated into English by CV - German version in PDF here]:

Concerning: Chess Olympiad Khanty-Mansiysk

Dear members of the men’s national team, dear chess friends,

In answer to my letter of May 19th, 2010 Mr Gustafsson answered by email on June 10th, 2010 that, on the given conditions you are not willing to play in Khanty-Mansiysk. Besides, he has started an initiative to find a sponsor as soon as possible, something that was clearly supported by me. To my knowledge this initiative hasn’t had the desired effect.

If no last-minute sponsor will contact Mr Gustafsson soon, this means the German Chess Federation won’t be able to send you to the Chess Olympiad. I wouldn’t only regret this terribly, but I’d be personally disappointed as well.

I can only partly understand that you keep on insisting on demands that, despite great efforts, couldn’t be fulfilled by either the German Chess Federation or the company.

Therefore I would personally like to ask you to reconsider your position and accept the same terms as two years ago. In case you’re still prepared to accept this, please declare this to the team captain not later than July 2nd 2010. After that he will be forced to nominate other players. I would have liked to push this deadline up front, if there wasn’t a deadline set by FIDE to enter the team.

At this weekend’s meeting of the Top Sport Commission it was decided that your status as selected players would become inactive for the time being, if you’re not prepared to play the upcoming Olympiad under the current conditions.

This would imply that any course of action to support you as top players would become impossible. Furthermore, for the year 2011 the team captain was requested to check whether the criteria for future support, i.e. the willingness of all players to cooperate with the federation, are still being met. I fully support this decision because in my opinion we cannot simply move on.

Support by the German Chess Federation, which partly involves a longer period of time, is naturally associated with the expectation to engage in an appropriate manner and in a responsible way for German chess.

On the other hand the German Chess Federation doesn’t want to close all doors. In any case it would be useful to have a meeting after the Olympiad, to which our Top Sport Coordinator will invite you, to discuss the situation. Still I hope that all these considerations won’t be necessary. The decision is yours.

Best regards,
Yours truly,

Robert von Weizsäcker.

Cool, no? Let me clarify a few things:

Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker found 0 Euros in two years of being the President of the German Chess Federation. (Maybe he simply has no time, being a Professor at a few universities?) The huge support he is threatening to cancel is this: for myself as German number one (my current ELO rating is 2684), the German Federation covers about half of my expenses for playing in exactly one tournament, the European Championship. That amounts to about 800 Euros a year, nothing more.
Now, of course, their direct threat to cancel all that help is making me sleep badly and giving me nightmares. Next time, maybe if I cover the coffee bill I hope Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker and my hard working Chess Federation will not cancel the important support for me?! We will see in the future if they have any mercy.

As we know, Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker is running his campaign for the ECU Presidency, and many European countries are giving their support to him. Now, the logical conclusion would be since he could do absolutely nothing for chess in his own country in two years, or again had no time for it, which, of course, led to the same result, can he do something for Europe? I would say probably not. So here comes the idea. Maybe we could open a charity foundation for the German Chess Federation and for Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker? Many people are sending small amounts for ?saving the forest? so maybe it could work with my dear Federation and Prof. Dr. Von Weizsäcker, too? It is hard to find anybody coming across as more poor and helpless than the German Federation.

Hope you enjoyed reading my statement. And please don?t get the idea that I have exaggerated. I really did my best to stay as close to the facts as possible.

Grandmaster Arkadij Naiditsch

Fabiano Caruana and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave are sharing the lead in Biel with one round to go. The two are on 5/8. After five more draws in round 7, the 8th round saw much more spectacle.

The Young Grandmaster Tournament is part of the Biel Chess Festival in Switzerland, which takes place July 17-30. Anish Giri, David Howell, Fabiano Caruana, Maxim Rodshtein, Parimarjan Negi, Dmitry Andreikin, Evgeny Tomashevsky, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Wesley So and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son play.

Rounds 7 & 8

After our last, and slightly critical report on Biel, in which we noted the many short draws between these ten young and ambitious players, the games of the 7th round were more interesting. Nonetheless, all of them ended peacefully anyway!

From all the players it seems that Vietnamese GM Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son came closest to victory thanks to the tactical shot 16…Nxe5! but then he spoilt his advantage.

Wesley So-Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son
Biel 2010

16…Nxe5!

Today no less than four games ended in victories. Only Andreikin and Caruana split the point again; the game always looked equal and in the end Black’s activity compensated for the pawn he lost.

In another game with Black, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son now did manage win, against Tomashevsky. And with creative play, we may add. Thanks to a strong pawn phalanx the exchange sac 27…Rxb6! was the obvious way to continue, and soon White had to give back the material, but more power moves (especially 36…d5!) decided the game.

Evgeny Tomashevsky-Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son
Biel 2010

36…d5!

Giri defeated So in a pawn ending, after some interesting tactics had appeared in the middlegame. The Philippine might still have drawn the game with 35…Qf6! because in that version, if White takes on f4, he will have a distant passer. But since the ending is quite complicated, we’ll refrain from giving a definite conclusion.

Anish Giri-Wesley So
Biel 2010

35…Qf6! instead of 35…Qxh4?

Negi is having a hard time in Biel and after a bad start the Indian is ‘even going for a draw in better positions’, as a Dutch grandmaster said today. He hadn’t seen today’s game yet, but it did look like this. Against Howell’s Alapin, Negi was fine after the opening and could have played for an advantage at some point, but instead he allowed a strong exchange sacrifice and then was outplayed in the subsequent ending.

Vachier-Lagrave played a strong game against Rodshtein but then almost let it slip away. Instead of going for mate, he somehow allowed the Israeli to continue the game, but eventually the rook ending was won anyway for the Frenchman, who thus caught Caruana in the standings.

Tomorrow is the last round with Rodshtein-Tomashevsky, Negi-Vachier-Lagrave, Caruana-Howell, So-Andreikin and Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son-Giri. There’s a possible tiebreak on Thursday morning if two players (or more) finish at the 1st place. In that case two rapid games (10 minutes & 10 seconds increment) will be played and if the result is 1-1, two blitz will be played.

Games rounds 7 & 8

Game viewer by ChessTempo

Links

• Official website
• Games in PGN via TWIC

According to a report in Sport Express by chess journalist Yuri Vasiliev, the FIDE Presidential Board in Tromso decided that the Candidates will be moved from Baku in Azerbaijan to Kazan in Russia. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov retains his position in the Candidates as the Azerbaijani representative.

Last week we reported that FIDE was intending to move the Candidates Matches (scheduled for March-April 2011 to determine the challenger of World Champion Viswanathan Anand in the 2012 WCh match) from Baku, Azerbaijan to Kazan, Russia. This report focused on Veselin Topalov’s open letter in which he stated that he ‘would not participate in any stage of the cycle for the World Chess Title that takes place in Russia’.

Yesterday, Sport Express journalist Yuri Vasiliev broke the news that the FIDE Presidential Board, currently together in Tromso, Norway, have announced the move to Kazan. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov retains his position in the Candidates as the Azerbaijani representative. The players (and pairings) are:

Topalov vs Kamsky ( 1 vs 8 )
Carlsen vs Radjabov ( 2 vs 7 )
Kramnik vs Mamedyarov ( 3 vs 6 )
Aronian vs Gelfand ( 4 vs 5 )

So far it’s not clear whether FIDE has responded to Emil Sutovsky’s open letter of last week in which the Israeli Grandmaster suggested some changes. However, according to Vasiliev, FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov did respond to Veselin Topalov’s open letter.

Sport Express mentions that Ilyumzhinov would send Topalov a letter ‘asking not to take hasty decisions’. If Topalov still refuses to go to Kazan, he will be replaced by the third player in the final standings of the 2008-2010 FIDE Grand Prix Series, Alexander Grischuk from Russia.

Update: as Colin mentions in the comments section, it looks as though Sutovsky?s proposal was rejected. On his LiveJournal page (http://emilchess.livejournal.com/) he says that it wasn?t FIDE?s fault, but one of the players insisted that there shouldn?t be more changes made during the cycle, even though the player accepted the changes were logical (no mention of who the player was). He also made it clear that his meeting Ilyumzhinov & being photographed with him in no way means that he supports Ilyumzhinov in the presidential campaign (he said he?s staying out of chess politics).

Update 2: Mr Sutovsky couldn’t confirm whether his proposal was rejected, but did say that one player rejected it: Boris Gelfand, who said “I think that your proposal is very interesting for the next cycle, but I strongly oppose any change of official regulations while the cycle is in process. I hope you’ll inform all interested parties about my opinion.”

© 2010, José Diaz

Links

• Interview with José Diaz
• José Diaz Official Website