Chess Chessbase magazine 121

ChessBase Magazine 121
Two European team championships constitute the main theme of this new issue of ChessBase Magazine, on one hand the Club Championship of Europe (in Kemer, Turkey) and on the other the recently finished European Team Championships (in Heraklion, Crete). Whereas in the club championships non-European players were also allowed to take part, including the newly crowned World Champion Vishy Anand, the Europeans were on their own in the national team championships. This did not, however, make much difference to the Elo average, since with the exception of Kramnik and Leko all the top European players were appearing in their team colours. The title of the best European club team went to the Spanish team Linex Magic Merida, which featured Kamsky, Adams, Rublevsky, Sargissian, Cheparinov and Perez Candelario. Though nominally the strongest team, OSC Baden-Baden lost a lot of ground in rounds 3 and 4 and finished in 4th place. Alexei Shirov, who annotates his game against Azarov elsewhere on this DVD, just made it into second place with his team Ural Sverdlovskaya. All the games from the tournament are on the DVD, 41 of them with annotations provided, e.g., by Avrukh, Berg, Bologan, Movsesian, Radjabov and Sasikiran. In the competition for national teams, Russia won both the men’s and the women’s titles. The men’s team of Svidler, Morozevich, Grischuk, Alekseev and Jakovenko were quick off the mark and not until the final round against Spain did they concede a team point.One of the stars of the Spanish team, Vallejo Pons, has annotated two of his games for this DVD, and also one player from a (slightly) lower placed team in the championships, Michael Roiz, whose ELO performance of 2855 was the third best individual result, demonstrates two games from the championships. A new piece on the wider international chessboard is Ahmed Adly. Adly is 20 years old, comes from Egypt and is the new Youth U20 World Champion. So for the first time in the history of chess the youth world champion is from an African country. The proud new champion has annotated two of his victories for ChessBase Magazine.