Genrikh Chepukaitis

Review after round 7

4 rounds are left until the finish. Grandmaster V. Loginov, the champion from the last century, is the leader. Also the unpretentious result of +2 was achieved by the youngest participant, E. Alexeev. So they scored 4,5 each. International master Sivokho, the trainer of the young star, and grandmaster Ionov have 4 points each. The strongest players of St.Petersburg don’t play at this tournament. Though St.Petersburg Chess Federation attempted to make the tournament more imposing, it seems that they did not even try to invite the 14^th World Champion Khalifman, grandmasters Svidler, Sakaev, Salov or Solozhenkin. E. Shaposhnikov who was the champion in 1999 and shared first place with Loginov in 2000 decided to play in the semi-final, showed a poor result there and thus lost his right to play in the final tournament. He was quite upset, but instead he found himself free to go to Kazan and won there the Russia Championship under 20. He is a high level player, 1 m 90 cm high. He really brought the first prize from Kazan: the round sum of 1000 roubles reveals much about the Russia Chess Federation, and our local St.Petersburg Federation looks still quite impressive after this. FIDE president K. Ilyumzhinov is silent, he seems not to be going to do anything about this. So chess in Russia can share the fate of our ice-hockey rather soon.

As for the final – the only person to defeat the young star E. Alexeev so far was GM Sergey Ivanov. In the French Defence, which Ivanov knows as an expert, the boy decided to sacrifice some pawns. Ivanov took with pleasure. Having disregarded Fisher’s warning “Pawns are the soul of the game”, the young player failed to find sufficient tactical resources to save his position.

Alekseev, Evgeny - Ivanov, Sergey
Round 4