Pogonina.com offers you a selection of some of the most informative chess tweets from last week. All the fresh chess news in one short post:
Radjabov, Karjakin, Caruana, Topalov, Nakamura, Mamedyarov, Morozevich, Leko, Kamsky, Ponomariov, Giri, Kasimdzhanov in action in Zug FIDE Grand Prix The World Chess Championship match is scheduled to be held in Chennai Alekhine Memorial (a Russian-French event) is starting April 21st
Chess News: Alekhine Memorial - Aronian, Kramnik, Anand, etc.
Ex-Women's World Chess Champions Susan Polgar and Antoaneta Stefanova were born on April 19. Congratulations!
Another strong GM joins Twitter
Death Match The benefits of co-blogging Must-see photo shoot Magnus Carlsen in Time top-100, listed as a "titan" Congratulations to Etienne!
Have we missed some of the best tweets? You can contribute to our next top-10 stories chart by retweeting the post you like and adding @Pogonina to the message so that we can see it.
Natalia Pogonina Nominated for "Girl of the Month" by Russia 2 TV Channel
Written by Administrator
Friday, 19 April 2013
A leading Russian channel “Russia-2” has a sports program called “All included”. Unsurprisingly, one of their most popular projects is the “Girl of the month” contest. Most nominees are well-known female athletes, while some artists are also invited from time to time.
The reigning Olympic women’s chess champion & Russian women’s chess champion Natalia Pogonina was recently featured in the program. We would like to share with you the official pictures and a few more exclusive images:
a) White played Re7!? Calculate this line and evaluate it.
b) Super GM challenge: try to improve on Alexey Shirov's play and suggest a different continuation.
I recently was lucky enough to compete in the e2-e4 Brighton International, which was held in a very nice hotel, the old ship on the seafront. I went there from filming a quiz show for the BBC in London, (more of this in a future issue), so the travel didn't cost me very much.
Brighton is a very cosmopolitan place these days, and not for nothing is it known as "the London of the south." During the weekend in particular the city becomes flooded with visitors, and the place can become pretty busy. The weather, which was rather akin to the southern med during the summer, didn't harm in this regard.
One night I was downstairs at the pub Yates, coming out of the toilets. A drunken girl accosts one other guy and says to him "you look about 18" she then laughs before saying to his companion "you look about 19" she then took one look at me "you look about 45" I was rather taken aback by this, and could only mumble "thanks, you're very kind".
Fortunately chess is not a beauty contest, otherwise I doubt I would have ended up winning the tournament. I was helped by the fact that the tournament was very low-scoring and there were many quick draws between the grandmasters present. I was as guilty as this as anyone, and the only thing I could offer in our defence was that there was no prize money, (this is going to become increasingly commonplace for chess events I can imagine) so the only motivation was to play for rating points.
In fact winning my first four games was enough to win the event outright. The one thing that I took from the games themselves, was how often it pays to trust your instincts.
The Association of Chess Professionals has published the results of an open poll for the Book of the Year contest. The sample size was relatively low (167 votes), but remember: only ACP members were eligible for the voting procedure, so behind each choice there is a well-known chess professional.
Here are the winners:
Grandmaster Preparation-Calculation" by Jacob Aagaard, Quality Chess
"How I beat Fischer's record" by Judit Polgar, Quality Chess
"Fighting chess with Magnus Carlsen" by Adrian Mikhalchishin and Oleg Stetsko, Edition Olms AG
By candidate master Peter Zhdanov, editor of Pogonina.com
In this special weekly column we will be looking at the most unexpected upsets that happened last week. Players usually face opponents of a similar level. Considerably less frequent are situations when a significantly lower-rated player succeeds in beating a much stronger adversary.
If you have ever won a game against someone rated 300 points or above of yourself, please send it to us for publication. Any additional information (a photo, annotations, etc.) will be appreciated.
Chinese WGM Ju Wenjun scored 7/9 in Dubai Open, registering an impressive 2683 performance and finishing ahead of many strong GMs. Here is the final top-10:
1
GM
Rakhmanov Aleksandr
RUS
2591
7.5
55.5
2
GM
Volkov Sergey
RUS
2593
7.0
54.5
3
WGM
Ju Wenjun
CHN
2521
7.0
54.5
4
GM
Kuzubov Yuriy
UKR
2619
7.0
51.5
5
GM
Laznicka Viktor
CZE
2674
7.0
55.5
6
GM
Ehlvest Jaan
USA
2611
7.0
53.0
7
GM
Istratescu Andrei
FRA
2648
7.0
53.5
8
GM
Michalik Peter
SVK
2535
7.0
47.5
9
GM
Sokolov Ivan
NED
2643
7.0
49.5
10
GM
Akopian Vladimir
ARM
2704
6.5
56.5
According to the FIDE website, this is her fourth GM norm, so it is not clear why the talented WGM hasn't applied for GM yet.
