2011/2 Bundesliga Info
From regular reader (and commenter) Thomas:
The deadline to submit team compositions has just passed, these are the most spectacular newcomers (all info only available in German for the time being [DM: source here]):
- Aronian will play for (what used to be) a rather modest club from Berlin that narrowly escaped degradation last season. SF Berlin ("Schachfreunde" = Chess friends) were actually praised for relying mostly on German players (which explains the difficulties they had). Though Aronian, who lives in Berlin, is hardly a typical mercenary. Even funnier: he will play second board because his student Hrant Melkumyan (Elo 2600) also joins the club and wants to play first board.
- The €€€ star team from Baden-Baden hired another (ex-)world champion: Kasimdzhanov who will probably play on the lower boards.
- Another "rusty" world champion, Anatoly Karpov, will play for Hockenheim that just promoted to first division "as his international commitments permit". Years ago he gave his name to a chess academy there and actually shows up there every now and then.
- Finally, Bremen hired not just Romain Edouard, but also Ivan Salgado Lopez and Jon Ludvig Hammer.
Reader Comments (4)
I take it that the writer means SF Berlin avoided relegation rather than degradation.
@Philip Sells: Yep, English isn't my first language ... I meant "having to play one level lower next season". In Dutch (I currently live in the Netherlands) the corresponding term is "degradatie", would degradation mean "disqualification" in British and/or American English? Dennis is welcome to edit my text.
[DM: Nope, "degradation" in English doesn't imply disqualification or anything of the sort. Rather, one speaks of degradation to suggest that something has degraded - has gotten worse - and this generally in a moral sense.]
The full story was: they had to play a tiebreak match against another team that scored exactly the same number of match AND board points - that match ended 4.5-3.5 and could have gone the other way. And they reached that tiebreak match only because a player from the opponent's team had blundered badly in the final regular round, losing a won knight ending. On their live ticker SF Berlin had already accepted their fate, and then added "a miracle has happened!"
@Thomas, thanks for writing back. I had thought you might be writing from German; is 'degradatie' in Dutch a cognate of 'absteigen'?
@Philip Sells: Yes, thinks can get complicated switching between the several languages I know (I also speak French and a tiny bit of Spanish, but that's farther away from German, Dutch and English). "Degradatie" in Dutch is indeed the same as "Abstieg" (the noun, absteigen is the verb) in German - I am currently more familiar with the Dutch term because the team I play for was often affected ,:( [but we also sometimes promoted to the next-higher league]. And as Dutch is somewhat in between German and English, I actually wrote "from Dutch" ... .
"Degradieren" in German is mostly used in the military - losing your rank (i.e. some stripes on your shoulder) which generally implies something immoral or illegal, some sort of scandal, something worse than losing a few chess games or matches. So it might be closer to the English meaning of "degradation"?
[DM: "Demoted".]