| Jun-19-04 | | bigbear: Bacrot is in Tripoli to win...He's now the strongest french chessplayer since...Alekhine. This game shows that he could be the man of that strange tournament. |
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| Jun-19-04 | | shr0pshire: Alekhine only played for the french a very little amount of the time. Alekhine was born in Russia, and when he won the world champion he claimed it in the name of his motherland the USSR/Russia, not French. It is misleading to characterize Alekhine as a French chess player, because he is mostly known as a Russian chess player. |
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| Jun-19-04 | | iron maiden: I thought Alekhine was exiled from the USSR around 1921. Did he really claim the WC in the name of the nation that expelled him? |
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Jun-19-04
 | | acirce: They didn't expel him, he just moved. |
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| Jun-19-04 | | Swindler: But after his win in the WC, didn't Alekhine denounce the Soviet Union, thereby making him persona non grata in Russia for the rest of his life? Also Spassky became (and still is I think) a citizen of France, sometime after his '72 match against Fischer (can't remember when...) |
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| Jun-19-04 | | shr0pshire: "When Alekhine and Capablanca played their title match in late 1927, no one was more startled by the Russian’s victory than, perhaps, Alekhine himself." http://www.worldchessnetwork.com/En... |
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Jun-19-04
| | acirce: <after his win in the WC, didn't Alekhine denounce the Soviet Union, thereby making him persona non grata in Russia for the rest of his life?> That's how I seem to remember it too. |
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| Jun-19-04 | | dragon40: Well, politics aside for once, this was a good game by Bacrot, who is indeed, playing to win! He has a decent style and should go into the later rounds of this tournament depending on the seedings. As much as I think the FIDE is basically a "joke", some of the Chess in the first round was pretty damn well played and interesting. Not many surprises other than a couple of players drawing instead of winning (Vanganian, for instance), but I tend to think it was becasue of starting with the black pieces and are waiting for Sunday to win the match with White. Here is to more good games and discussion of them here in the days and weeks to come! :) |
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