Wednesday, Oct 09, 2002
Wednesday, Oct 09, 2002 |
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Chess
By V.V. Subrahmanyam
The contenders for top honours in the second World Cup chess championship, to be held at the Ramoji City from October 9 to 21, are keeping their fingers crossed. The uniqueness of the format is what is keeping the players guessing. That despite being the overwhelming favourite, defending champion Viswanathan Anand himself is not keen on entertaining any predictions is a fair indication of the twists and turns this mega event can witness. The actual competition will start on Thursday with only the inaugural function scheduled for Wedensday when the groupings will also be finalised in the evening. Despite the absence of World champion Ruslan Ponomariov and other big guns like Garry Kasparov and Vladiminir Kramnik, the event's significance cannot be undermined. "I don't miss them personally,'' Anand quipped when posed this query on his arrival on Tuesday. But, he was quick to point out that there are quite a few young faces like India's Krishnan Sasikiran and Pentyala Harikrishna and 15-year-old GM Teimour Radjabov (Elo 2618). It is pertinent to recall what Kasparov has to say about Radjabov. "It will be very difficult in future to check this brilliant Radjabov and he is a potential World champion,'' he remarked. Anand's biggest challenge will likely come from Russia's Alexander Morosevich (Elo 2716), 2000 European blitz champion Alexey Dreev (Elo 2676), Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine (Elo 2711) and England's Nigel Short (Elo 2682). From the Indian perspective, the other two players to watch out are Sasikiran (Elo 2650), who won the prestigious Hastings edition last year, and Commonwealth champion Harikrishna (Elo 2568). Surely, the intense competition with the added pleasure of competing along with their hero, Anand, should inspirate these two to take a giant leap into the elite group. Interestingly, Evegeny Vladimirov, coach of Harikrishna, feels that his trainee should be the `dark horse' in this Cup because of his positional mastery and deep understanding of intricacies in the middle and end-games. In women's category, Yuhua Xu of China (Elo 2473) heads the list of contenders despite the presence of Maya Chiburdanidze of Georgia (Elo 2516) and Chen Zhu of China (Elo 2505). India's first WGM Subbaraman Vijayalakshmi and World junior champion, Koneru Humpy, will spearhead the Indian challenge in the distaff section. While the former made it amply clear that she will try her best to play good chess and cross the first hurdle, Humpy felt that since this was the toughest tournament for her it should give a fair hint of which way she was headed in world chess. The other Indians in the fray include former World under-18 champion, Aarthie Ramaswamy, Swathi Ghate, S. Meenakshi and Dronavalli Harika.
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