Saturday
Mar082014
Top Players on the Candidates
Saturday, March 8, 2014 at 9:57PM
Here are some excerpts from Magnus Carlsen, Alexander Grischuk and other elite players on the upcoming Candidates tournament, on the interesting new chess portal chess24.com. I'll have more to say about the site soon, but it looks pretty promising - there are contributions from Peter Svidler, Viswanathan Anand (though his material is aimed for semi-novice crowd), Artur Yusupov (or "Jussupow" in the German spelling), Jan Gustafsson and other strong players.
tagged Candidates 2014
Reader Comments (4)
The only thing I can mention is the poor opening preparation of Kramnik, particularly when he has the black pieces. (Grischuk)
Any comments?
[DM: That was a funny-strange comment. Grischuk is certainly strong enough to have such an opinion, but it should be noted that he is sometimes a bit droll and even sarcastic, so maybe it wasn't meant seriously.]
I also like chess24.com, but might be a bit biased (for reasons I don't want to reveal, I am not part of the team). This particular article had originally appeared at the Russian Federation website and therefore has a "Chess in Translation" feeling to it - Colin McGourty is part of the team.
Generally it seems that western sources, at least for the time being, have far less on the candidates event than last year (when Carlsen participated).
I found the comment below from Grischuk to be very interesting and worth noting. I agree with him: anyone winning the candidates tournament will have so much confidence!
Grischuk: "The thing is that the winner of such a tournament will already be a different person than he was before the start of the event. So even if you take, for instance, Anand, then with that “other” Anand it definitely won’t be easy for Carlsen."
Another interesting thing to note is that, both Grischuk and Jakovenko, put Anand in the bottom 2 or 3 (in terms of being a potential winner)
The Grischuk quote is a joke, 100%. Gríschuk is always very funny in interviews !