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Post by cjelli on Mar 25, 2019 9:21:07 GMT -8
You'd think I'd forget about it? 
You probably wouldn't know, but the US Chess Championship is going on right now in St. Louis, both men and women.
The men's championship is featuring all of the cream: Caruana, So, Nakamura, local boy Sam Shankland, Yoenis CespedesLeinier Dominguez, and even some kids born in 2000 or earlier. After five rounds, around halfway point, there is a 5-way tie between Sevian, Xiong, Nakamura, So and Dominguez. The favorite Caruana has been treading water so far with five draws.
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Post by Fugazi on Mar 25, 2019 10:17:36 GMT -8
Oy Vey  |
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Post by cjelli on Mar 25, 2019 12:27:43 GMT -8
The new Lithuanian Women Champion, Marija Shibaeva |
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Post by cjelli on Apr 2, 2019 16:40:16 GMT -8
The US Chess Championships concluded with Hikaru Nakamura winning his fifth title, half a point ahead of the favorite, Fabiano Caruana, and the recent Cuban defector, Leinier Dominguez. The women title was taken by a storm in a Bobby Fischer style by Jennifer Yu, just 17 years old, two and a half points ahead of her nearest rival. The winners take home $50K and $25K respectively.
The eyes of the chess world now switch to Azerbaijan, where ten grandmasters out of the top 20, led by the World Champion and #1 Magnus Carlsen of Norway compete for a 100K Euro prize fund, with 30K going to the winner.
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Post by cjelli on Apr 24, 2019 7:24:29 GMT -8
The US Seniors Team (50+) convincingly won the World Senior 50+ title at the event in Rhodes, Greece. The US team was ranked #1 prior to the tournament and cruised easily to the title, conceding just one tie in nine matches, three match points ahead of the second-place Italy and five points ahead of Israel.
Russia won the 65+ event trophy ahead of England, France and Israel. US didn't field a team for that event (and Russia didn't field a team for the 50+ one).
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Post by cjelli on Apr 29, 2019 13:37:00 GMT -8
World Champion Magnus Carlsen is definitely back into his monstrous form of the 2013-2015 after taking two supertournaments in a row in Shamkir, Azerbaijan (+5=4) and then in Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden with even bigger +6=3. He is +15=16-0 since the start of the year, and most of his opponents look doomed even before he begins playing them.
Latest title challenger Fabiano Caruana of the US scored an admirable +3=6 in the latter event, which normally should be sufficient for a solid first place finish, but not with Carlsen playing like this.
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Post by sharkhaywood on Jul 12, 2019 12:45:53 GMT -8
How has this not been posted on here Cjelli?
The International Chess Federation says it has suspended a player at a tournament in France after the man was "caught red-handed using his phone during a game."
The organization said Friday on Twitter that all the evidence in the case of Igors Rausis had been sent to its ethics committee and that it was "determined to fight cheating in chess."
Rausis is a 58-year-old Latvian-Czech player who won the grandmaster title in 1992 and has over the years represented Latvia, Bangladesh and the Czech Republic.
Federation Director-General Emil Sutovsky wrote on Facebook that Rausis had long been under suspicion for cheating and that catching him was "merely the first shot" in a years-long battle against cheating.
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Post by cjelli on Jul 12, 2019 14:01:50 GMT -8
How has this not been posted on here Cjelli? The International Chess Federation says it has suspended a player at a tournament in France after the man was "caught red-handed using his phone during a game." The organization said Friday on Twitter that all the evidence in the case of Igors Rausis had been sent to its ethics committee and that it was "determined to fight cheating in chess." Rausis is a 58-year-old Latvian-Czech player who won the grandmaster title in 1992 and has over the years represented Latvia, Bangladesh and the Czech Republic. Federation Director-General Emil Sutovsky wrote on Facebook that Rausis had long been under suspicion for cheating and that catching him was "merely the first shot" in a years-long battle against cheating. Somehow I didn't see it in the news I've been following.
Rausis has been around for long before cheating became an issue, he is a good player, and it's a shame. Sutovsky is my friend, btw, I was at his wedding. He's a great guy, a bit of a smart ass though.
Ok, it just broke down on my favorite Russian chess website. Seems like he was caught in the toilet cabin(!) using his phone to analyze his ongoing game; there are now concerns that he may appeal his punishment because tracking him inside the cabin might've been a violation of his rights.
Besides, he was abusing another loophole: if you play a very weak opponent with a huge rating difference (> 400), the rating difference is still set to 400, and the gain in rating is 0.8pts per win. Now the point is if you crack some threshold on FIDE rating list you get an invitation to a couple of events with a fixed solid payout. So Rausis went on rampage playing low-level tournaments around Europe and whitewashing them. Each tournament would net him 8-10 rating points.
Now there's a risk that your weak opponent may draw against you (or even win) and in case of such a draw, even one, the rating loss due to it would be over the gain of winning the remainder. So he took an extra insurance in the toilets.
He also abused the fact the cheating control on these low-key events is next to non-existent. However his meteoric rise woke the suspicions up, and he was waited at the Strasbourg event and ambushed.
It's worth mentioning that he's a player strong enough once he would get an invitation to the aforementioned top-class event, where cheating would probably be out of question, he could still master at least a few draws against stronger opponents.
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Post by Fugazi on Jul 13, 2019 19:48:01 GMT -8
The cheater in the can  |
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Post by cjelli on Jun 26, 2020 16:12:45 GMT -8
Here we go...
The state-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation, its Sydney bureau in particular, was the first one to finally implement the latest Russian jokes about chess being racist.
However, the World Champion, Magnus Carlsen (Norway) hasn't avoided the malady which strikes the Western Europeans harder than anyone else. If only Magnus gave slightly more time than zero to studying chess history, he would learn that the rule of White moving first hasn't been finalized until La Belle Epoque (even at Morphy times (1850x-1860x) it wasn't that unusual for Black to start a game. The final rules, and thus the complaint should be addressed to the German Chess Union, and the blame of racism should fall on a country that at that time hadn't and hadn't had any overseas colonies, never engaged in slave trade and wasn't even averagely racist in that Zeitgeist. |
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