Saturday, September 19, 2009 3:21 AM
The World Chess Federation rating list for September reveals that the highestranked Russian grandmaster is Vladimir Kramnik at No. 5.
Today’s dominant players are Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, Viswanathan Anand of India and Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who are ranked first, second and fourth in the world, respectively – a far cry from the days when Russians dominated most of the top positions.
The collapse of Soviet communism has profoundly affected the place of chess in Russian society.
Russia has a plethora of talented grandmasters – more by far than any other country.
But without state support or an equivalent, they don’t have the training or material wherewithal to make their traditional runs on the world title.
In addition, the globalization of chess outside of the former Soviet Union, in which the Internet plays a central role, has created and enhanced other epicenters of chess talent.
For the first time, Anatoly Karpov – the 58-year-old former world champion from Russia – is no longer rated among the top 100 players in the world.
His decline attests to how hard it is to stay even modestly close to the top in today’s fiercely competitive chess milieu.
Source: http://www.columbusdispatch.com
Odd tone and interpretations of the article – not only because Kramnik is actually shared fourth with Carlsen in the September list and just one point behind Aronian (who has opened up a gap with his Bilbao result).
OK, three other countries (Bulgaria, India and Norway) each have a single strong player. But the top 30 still contains: 9 Russians, 8 from other ex-Soviet countries (including Karjakin still listed as UKR) and three ex-Sovit emigrants (Gelfand, Shirov and Movsesian). This makes 20/30, not that bad after all!?
This article is written by someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
So Carlsen is a dominating player, and Kramnik who has the same Elo and beats Carlsen regularly is not ??
Karpov as proof for his thesis, a player who stopped playing competitive chess a decade ago ??
The Soviet Union is (was) not Russia : for example, Kasparov was
an Armenian Jew, Tal a Latvian and Petrosian Armenian !
Very poor artickle by someone whois showing anti russian sentiments1
Typical american journalism!
And they fail to mention that most chess people view Kramnik as the real World Champion, stripped of his title by FIDE and forced to play as challenger. Also the fact that Topalov and Anand had incredible losing records, that are laughable, against Garry Kasparov. So if you toss those two out it is all between Kramnik a Russian and Carlsen a Norwegian trained by Kasparov another Russian. Now all the facts in this article are defeated.
Shockingly poor article. Individual domination or winning world championships is not necessarily a true reflection of the strength of the playing nation. It’s like saying Switzerland is the strongest tennis nation because Roger Federer is so dominant! Russia still has the most # of GMs by far (192) and IMs (459) and 1912 total titled players. Next best is Ukraine with 411 titled players! The average rating of the top 10 Russian players is 2728! Next best is Ukraine with 2697. Russia has 9 super-GMs (maybe 10). Next best is Ukraine with 4. And I’m not even including those players who learned and developed their chess in Russia before emigrating.
Susan, “The Russians” as Bobby would say has been over quite a while now why are people surprised? They never beat Fischer anyway,so the pretense is up, U.S. stille no.1- Go OBAMA!! hehe. Susan i think thats gunna tick them off!