Isle of Man blues for Brits
By Malcolm Pein
Last Updated: 12:01am
BST 03/10/2007
Yet another Eastern European carve-up marked the end of the 16th Monarch Assurance tournament at Port Erin on the Isle of Man. Although this event is to be the last one supported by the original sponsor there will be a different form of chess event on the island next year. British chess is indebted to Patrick Taylor of Monarch Assurance and Dennis Hemsley the original organiser of the tournament.
Final scores: Yuri Yakovich, Mikhail Kobalia (Russia), Vitali Golod, Michael Roiz (Israel), Zahar Efimenko (Ukraine), Mateusz Bartel (Poland) 6½/9
British players have done badly at the Isle of Man but I cannot remember a Monarch tournament where there was no Briton in the top 25 finishers as happened this time. The top British score was 5/9 as a slaughter took place in the last round. Only Peter Wells emerged with any credit, he faced a very tough field.
The one bright spot was the brilliant performance of Jeff Horner which I will look at tomorrow.
Overall this felt like yet another event where there was not a huge amount of interest, without the participation of the best British players or the presence of any real stars.
The 2004 event was a happy exception to this, with Viktor Korchnoi and Hikaru Nakamura enlivening proceedings. Also in that year Jonathan Rowson and Murray Chandler took part and finished joint third.
I hope the organisers of the next generation of Manx tournaments will give a little more thought to whom they invite. The Eastern European GMs ranked between 50th and 250th in the world are, quite reasonably, primarily concerned with the prize money and few of them play really entertaining chess.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
No personality, no charisma = death of chess