[chessmind] Dennis Monokroussos: Quotation Time #10: The Answer is...

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Posted by Dennis Monokroussos:
Quotation Time #10: The Answer is...
http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1210794062.shtml


   Victor Bologan, as seemingly everyone knew when looking at the
   [1]earlier post. Here's the quotation, embedded in italics within the
   full paragraph from Bologan's Victor Bologan: Selected Games
   1985-2004, p. 184:

     My victory at Dortmund underscored the inequities of the tournament
     structure - there's no intermingling of the various rating groups.
     I can't recall a tournament in which, say, both Adams and Moiseenko
     played. Along the same lines, Kasimdzhanov's victory in Libya shows
     that there is not any great chasm in playing strength between the
     "elite" and us "mere mortals". There are many more than ten people
     who know how to play chess, and those ten would also find it more
     interesting to play against new opponents, rather than just
     incessantly playing each other.

     The context of the quote was his surprise victory in Dortmund 2003,
     ahead of Anand, Kramnik, Radjabov and Leko. (Incidentally, another
     non-"elite" player, Naiditsch, won the event in 2005.) Note that
     Bologan isn't claiming that there's no gap between the
     super-tournament regulars and players like himself; what he denies
     is the presence of a "great chasm".
     And this seems to be right. In events where the "mere mortals" are
     allowed in to take the scraps, they occasionally run off with the
     main course. Khalifman won the FIDE World Championship in 1999 and
     in two other events should have eliminated Anand from the
     competition. (And two other final four players from that event were
     also outsiders - Akopian and Nisipeanu.) Ponomariov wasn't really a
     favorite when he won in 2001 and Kasimdzhanov wasn't in 2005. In
     round-robins, Bologan and Naiditsch were surprises, too, and the
     examples can probably be multiplied with a little research. Maybe
     they can't (or at least don't) achieve those results as often as
     Anand and Kramnik, but they're strong enough to do it sometimes.
     What should be done about it? More intermixing of the very top
     players with with the high-2600/low-2700 crowd is clearly what
     Bologan wants, and his rationale seems plausible. One possible
     difficulty is that there are so many of these second-tier players
     now that it's hard to give them all a chance to participate in
     super-tournaments. On the other hand, the number of elites is
     growing too, and the lack of sufficient country club events means
     that they have to go slumming from time to time. So maybe the
     problem is taking care of itself.

References

   1. http://chessmind.powerblogs.com/posts/1210713503.shtml