Author: Michael Vox
Date: 03:06:44 06/20/03
http://www.rochadekuppenheim.de/heco/index.html 19th June, 2003 A couple of years ago, there was a strange tale reported of a top player playing in a big open in Slovenia, who wished to be simply known as "GM 2595". The GM in question turned out to be Russia's Evgeny Sveshnikov, who took the radical stance of trying to change his name as he saw it as a threat to his livelihood with all his games appearing on chess databases. His argument was that it made it easier for weaker opponents to prepare against him in the large European Opens he had to compete in to earn a living, following the demise of the Soviet Union. Apparently Sveshnikov was at it again, and was behind a revolt at the recent Russian Team Championships that took place May 16-25 in Tolghiatti (part of the Penza Region), as the players voted not to publish the scores of the games on the internet. After the event, however, several anonymous players passed on their daily bulletins to allow the games to be duly published on websites such as Mark Crowther's The Week In Chess. The real-time coverage of an important event such as this with a star-studded line-up would not have done any harm to the popularity of the game, and could even have encouraged a big-time sponsor. Some of the top players taking part in the 14-team event included Peter Svidler, Alexander Khalifman, Alexander Grischuk, Aleksei Dreev, Alexander Morozevich, Sergei Rublevsky and even the timeless Viktor Korchnoi. Surprisingly, no Moscow team made it to the six-team 'A' Finals after the preliminary group stages, and the event was won by Ladja-Kazan-1000 (Rublevsky, Bologan, Smirin, Kharlov, Vaganian etc) ahead of Nornickel (Dreev, Malakhov, Zvjaginsev, Onischuk etc) and Tomsk-400 (Morozevich, Khalifman, Filippov etc) and St. Petersburg (Svidler, Sakaev, Volkov, Korchnoi etc.).
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