The third day of the FIDE World Women’s Chess Championship: Tiebreaks

Grandmaster Iossif Dorfman, a former USSR and French Chess Champion, talks to Joachim Iglesias about chess life in the Soviet Union, seconding Garry Kasparov for four World Championship matches, coaching the 9-year-old Etienne Bacrot, new chess talents (he feels Vladislav Artemiev has much more potential than Sergey Karjakin) and his book and now video series, The Method in Chess.

Before we get to the interview, here are some key moments from Iossif’s career:

• Born on May 1st 1952 in Zhytomyr, Soviet Ukraine
• Awarded the title of Merited Master of Sports of the USSR in 1973
• European Champion with the USSR in 1977
• Became an International Master in 1977
• USSR Champion in 1977
• Obtained the Grandmaster title in 1978
• Seconded Garry Kasparov during four of his World Championship matches from 1984 to 1987
• Came to live in France in 1989
• Starts training 9-year-old Etienne Bacrot in 1992, helping him to become the youngest grandmaster in history
• French Champion in 1998
• Contributor and commentator for chess24’s French site since 2019

Joachim Iglesias: Hello, Iossif. If you don’t mind, we’ll first take a chronological look at your career as a player, and then coach, before getting to current projects. You were born in 1952 in present-day Ukraine. At what age did you learn to play chess ? 

Iossif Dorfman: I vividly remember the day a friend of the family offered to play chess and taught me the rules, but I didn’t really start to play until I was 11, which even at the time was very late.

Like Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, who has a degree in Mathematics, you went to university. Is that a choice you regret? Would you advise promising young players nowadays to do a degree?

I spent five years studying Engineering at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. You have to understand that at the time becoming a professional player was extremely difficult, since the slots were so scarce. Rafael Vaganian, for example, finished runner-up in the 1975 Soviet Championship without being a professional. In the USSR, the best players had a huge amount of recognition – they were as well-known as cosmonauts and could play in front of halls packed with thousands of spectators. There was very little money, however, and you had to be a little crazy to choose to become a professional. In France there’s no recognition: who knows Maxime, Etienne or Laurent? No-one, or almost no-one. Having said that, nowadays it’s possible to live well from chess in France, but it’s become an altogether different and varied profession. You have to give classes, write books and make videos on the internet as well as playing games. We’re far from the cliché, still in vogue in the 90s, of a chess player who gets up at 2pm in order to play blitz for money in the bars…

On January 1st 1977, Karpov is the World Champion and you’re still only a Soviet Master of Sport, but you’re about to have an incredible year…

I’d already had major successes before that. You need to realise that in that era Master of Sport is like Grandmaster nowadays. To make a norm it was necessary to score +6 in the USSR U27 Championship, which, as you can imagine, was pretty tough. I’d won that tournament with +11, becoming a Master of Sport with 4 rounds to spare.

In 1976 I won the Red Army Championship, which was as strong as the current French Championship.

I then went on to win the Premier League, a qualifier for the USSR Championship final, by 1.5 points. It was almost all grandmasters, such as Tseshkovsky, Sveshnikov, Beliavsky…

In the final of the USSR Championship I won six games, but unfortunately I also lost too many for a place on the podium.

Read more at chess24

The Paris tournament of the Grand Chess Tour, running from June 21-25 started with exciting chess from the players, and many dramatic reversals. Both Magnus Carlsen and Wesley So took off with 2.5/3, but it was really Carlsen’s show as he displayed excellent form on the first day. With many games and snippets, here is the illustrated report by GM Alex Yermolinsky.

The Paris tournament of the Grand Chess Tour is running from June 21-25. It is a combination of Rapid and Blitz games. The ten participants are Magnus Carlsen, Wesley So, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Grischuk, Sergey Karjakin, Veselin Topalov, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Etienne Bacrot. They will play nine rapid games, three a day, from June 21–23. The games start at 14:00h, 15:30h and 17:00h European Standard Summer Time. The Blitz tournament is on June 24 and 25, with nine rounds on each day, starting at 14:00h. The total prize fund is $150,000!

Note that the event is using the Bronstein mode: the players have 25 minutes for all the moves of a rapid game, and a ten second delay per move. This means that the clock does not run for ten seconds – the point is that you cannot accumulate time by playing very quickly in the Bronstein Mode.

This year’s Grand Chess Tour Series kicked off today with a Rapid/Blitz event in Paris. There will be two more similar tournaments, next week in Leuven and in August in St. Louis. It is interesting how this series, the brainchild of Garry Kasparov, has morphed into a combination of three different kinds of chess. Perhaps, it wasn’t Garry’s original intention, but as he himself admitted in his recent interview, it’s getting harder to find sponsors for classical time control tournaments willing to join the Tour. I guess the organizers in Norway and other places prefer to have their own exclusive event with a full control over selection of participants. Garry talks about adding one more Rapid/Blitz event in 2018 – surely a sign of the times.

Before the start of the tournament, the main question was how Magnus Carlsen would respond to his recent string of mediocre (by his standards) results. Magnus gave an emphatic answer by scoring two wins and one draw on the opening day, albeit not without some cooperation from his opponents. First he drew Grischuk with Black in a solid, error-free game. Then came a game against one of his favorite opponents not named Hikaru.

This win brought Carlsen’s advantage in their head-to-head encounters to +17-3=11. Some head scratching for Shak to do.

This is how without doing anything in particular, Carlsen took the lead and pushed his rapid rating over 2900.One wonders if his opponents will continue their blundering ways, and what happens if they stop.

Level with Carlsen is Wesley So, also with 2.5/3. Actually, it’s 5/6, as rapid games in this tournament count twice as much as blitz games to give some balance to scoring in two different disciplines. Wesley’s path to a good start was even rockier. He could have easily lost the following game in the first round.  read more on chessbase

So the standings after Day 2 of rapid chess are as follows:

See also:

• Official website
• All the games with computer analysis on chess24
• Kasparov on hand for Paris Grand Chess Tour launch
• Paris Grand Chess Tour Day 1: Carlsen and So lead

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Six Top 10 players turned down their FIDE Grand Prix invitations, but that still leaves Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Levon Aronian, Hikaru Nakamura and Anish Giri topping the line-up for the four tournament series that starts in the United Arab Emirates city of Sharjah in under two weeks’ time. Moscow-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, which sponsors Sergey Karjakin individually, has also been announced as a partner of the Grand Prix series.

The 2017 FIDE Grand Prix features 24 players, who are required to play in three of the four events. Each tournament will be a 9-round Swiss Open with 18 players, with the winner taking home €20,000 (and the 18th player €2,500) of a €130,000 prize fund. That compares poorly to the $75,000 on offer for first place in the classical Grand Chess Tour events, but some of the world’s best players are willing to play since the top two finishers in the Grand Prix series qualify for the 2018 Candidates Tournament. They’ll be joined there by Sergey Karjakin, the World Cup finalists, two rating qualifiers and one organiser nominee for the 8-player tournament that will produce Magnus Carlsen’s next challenger.

The four Grand Prix events are as follows:

• February 17-28 | Sharjah, UAE
• May 11-22 | Moscow, Russia
• July 5-16 | Geneva, Switzerland
• November 15-26 | Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Less than two weeks remain before things kick off in Sharjah, and while we still don’t know the 18 players who will compete, Agon have finally released the overall 24-player line-up. It looks as follows, with the ratings and rankings taken from the February 2017 FIDE rating list:

1. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (FRA), 2796, world no. 5
2. Levon Aronian (ARM), 2785, world no. 7
3. Hikaru Nakamura (USA), 2785, world no. 8
4. Anish Giri (NED), 2769, world no. 10
5. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (AZE), 2766, world no. 11
6. Ding Liren (CHN), 2760, world no. 12
7. Pavel Eljanov (UKR), 2759, world no. 13
8. Harikrishna (IND), 2758, world no. 14
9. Michael Adams (ENG), 2751, world no. 16
10. Ian Nepomniachtchi (RUS), 2749, world no. 17
11. Peter Svidler (RUS), 2748, world no. 18
12. Alexander Grischuk (RUS), 2742, world no. 20
13. Wei Yi (CHN), 2725, world no. 26
14. Ernesto Inarkiev (RUS), 2723, world no. 28
15. Boris Gelfand (ISR), 2721, world no. 29
16. Li Chao (CHN), 2720, world no. 30
17. Evgeny Tomashevsky (RUS), 2711, world no. 34
18. Teimour Radjabov (AZE), 2710, world no. 35
19. Dmitry Jakovenko (RUS), 2709, world no. 36
20. Francisco Vallejo Pons (ESP), 2709, world no. 38
21. Richard Rapport (HUN), 2692, world no. 50
22. Alexander Riazantsev (RUS), 2671, world no. 77
23. Salem Saleh (UAE), 2656, world no. 99
24. Jon Ludvig Hammer (NOR), 2628, world no. 158

Some observations:

• 7 of the 15 qualifiers rejected their invitations, including the world’s Top 4. Those were: Carlsen, Caruana, So, Kramnik, Anand, Karjakin and Topalov. Carlsen is of course World Champion, Karjakin automatically plays the Candidates, while Caruana, So and Kramnik may hope to gain one of the two rating places. Anand’s hopes seem to lie with the World Cup alone, while Topalov is an outspoken critic of the current FIDE leadership
• 4 players will have a busy year as they compete in both the FIDE Grand Prix and the Grand Chess Tour: Nakamura, Aronian, MVL and Nepomniachtchi
• 3 players were listed as reserves if replacements were required: Grischuk, Li Chao and Harikrishna. They all play.
• 13 players who didn’t directly qualify are playing. Although not specified, it’s likely Mamedyarov, Jakovenko, Gelfand and Adams play as additional reserves based on ratings, leaving Agon’s 9 permitted nominees as: Radjabov, Inarkiev, Vallejo, Salem Saleh, Wei Yi, Hammer, Nepomniachtchi, Riazantsev and Rapport.

Originally the Grand Prix regulations stated that nominees needed to have had a 2700 classical rating (or 2650 for former men’s or women’s World Champions), though that was later changed to read “2600 for former men and women national or world champions”, with a provision added to allow nominees with a 2575 rating in at least one 2016 rating list. That latter addition to the regulations seems to have been unnecessary, since Riazantsev, Saleh and Hammer have all won their national championships.

It’s not clear which of the players took advantage of the option of finding €100,000 in sponsorship in order to play, with Ernesto Inarkiev one of the few players whose participation was announced in advance after an arrangement between his Russian Republic of Ingushetia and FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

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