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| Jan-18-10 | | Red October: his games are testimony enough, title or no title! |
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| Jan-18-10 | | Petrosianic: +0-2=8 vs. Kasparov
+0-2=7 vs. Kramnik
+0-13=18 vs. Anand
Yep, you were right. His games are definitely testimony of his true status. |
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Jan-20-10
 | | dx9293: Happy Birthday! |
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Jan-20-10
 | | visayanbraindoctor: <whiteshark: "I have always said that the knockout system is not an ideal scheme. And I hope the system which is going to replace it will be a stepping stone to a fairer scheme of identifying the champion." -- Alexander Khalifman >
Former solely FIDE World Champion GM Khalifman is admirably principled. One would expect a FIDE champion to defend the two rounder KOs of the past World Cups and FIDE world championship tournaments. Instead, he sees the limitations of a two-rounder KO system; and criticizes it. |
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Jan-20-10
 | | chancho: <Petrosianic: His games are definitely testimony of his true status> Yes, he had a bad record against Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand, but there are many a player in the database who is in the same situation versus that trio. But Alexander does have a decent record against these guys: search "khalifman v topalov" search "khalifman v karpov" search "khalifman v kamsky" search "khalifman v shirov" |
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| May-18-10 | | vonKrolock: His record against Kasparov is quite decent in my view http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches... Some hard fought draws in <classical> games - A pity that near the end of the century there was not a <decent> Candidates Tournament any more, a player like Khalifman would maybe show his class in a more irrefutable form than over the <Vegas roulette>'s green towels - maybe never above the Karpov/Kasparov patterns, but surelly a match in his days for the Kamsky, Kramnik, Anand, Leko, Topalov etc team |
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| May-19-10 | | vonKrolock: Well, but vs <Nigel> http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches... |
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| Jun-27-10 | | stanleys: The Russian site www.crestbook.com has launched a project - "press-conferences" with well-known GMs (the questions being asked by the users of the site) Here is the first part of the Khalifman's conference (translated): http://www.crestbook.com/node/1233 |
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| Jun-28-10 | | vonKrolock: <stanleys> Great link! quote <"...it never even came into my head to consider myself the equal of <Steinitz. He defeated <Zukertort, but I had to master <Kamsky, <Gelfand, and <Polgar. Now compare.<...> ">>>>>>> on composition: quote <"I very much love to solve studies, but I have not succeeded in composing anything interesting, although I have tried."> |
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| Jun-28-10 | | Petrosianic: <Yes, he had a bad record against Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand, but there are many a player in the database who is in the same situation versus that trio. But Alexander does have a decent record against these guys:> Janosevic had a winning record against Bobby Fischer. There's no denying it's impressive, but I don't really consider him world championship timber either. Like Kasim, Khalifman was never better than about #50 in the world. His Las Vegas win wasn't even a 2700 Performance, according to chessmetrics. On the one hand, you feel sorry for him. He had no part in the split, and did nothing wrong. On the other hand, he knew when he played the thing that the winner would be left with a joke title. If the winner of Karpov-Timman and Karpov-Kamsky wasn't accepted as world champion, how could the winner of Las Vegas hope to be? |
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| Aug-17-10 | | polarmis: Khalifman doesn't play very much nowadays, but he recently won the Minsk Open (in Belarus). I've translated an interview he gave there - he really is a great interviewee! http://www.chessintranslation.com/2... Here's a fragment on his experience after winning in Las Vegas: <You see, after winning the title it was no longer so easy to travel to some run-of-the-mill open tournament without special conditions. To put it crudely, my colleagues wouldn’t understand me. They’d say look, you’re the World Champion and you’re not asking for conditions which means, surely, that they’ll soon start making us pay to take part i.e. it would have seriously baffled my grandmaster colleagues. And as for round robin tournaments… it’s not something I want to go into in great depth, but it turned out that for some reason they didn’t invite me. So you get a funny situation: the World Champion, one of the very highest ratings… others are invited to round-robin tournaments, while I’m not. So I started to devote more time to my school...> |
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| Aug-17-10 | | Troller: <Petrosianic> I would rate Khalifman above Kasim. Las Vegas was stronger than Tripolis for one thing. I think also he's had some top-10 appearances back around 1991 or so. Chessmetrics has Khalifman peaking at #8 in the world, Kasim at #13, for what it's worth. Of course this does not constitute a World Champion, but I wouldn't compare him to a nobody like Janosevic, rather someone like, e.g. Zoltan Ribli. A solid elite player making it to the candidates on some occasions, but no real threat for the crown. I think it likely Khalifman would have been a candidate, had the old system continued. However, he has often been focussing more on his work as a trainer. After Las Vegas I remember PH Nielsen had a remark that Khalifman was in fact way better than his rating indicated, but that he wasn't very serious about his career. |
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| Dec-11-10 | | Brandon plays: Wow, checking the last three or four pages of his games he has a lot of draws. Quite a few of them seem to be games without very many moves. It doesn't seem like he is very much of a fighter. |
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Jan-18-12
 | | wordfunph: "One should respect a defeated opponent!"
- Alexander Khalifman
happy birthday GM! |
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Jan-18-12
 | | talisman: happy birthday champ! |
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| Jun-20-12 | | TheVillageIdiot: <Alexander Khalifman & Rustam Kasimdzhanov are the Weakest Fide Champions
They won on a pure luck and were not able to dominate a single tournament after their wins> What about Ponomariov?? Is he considered to be weak too? |
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| Jun-20-12 | | King Death: < TheVillageIdiot: <Alexander Khalifman & Rustam Kasimdzhanov are the Weakest Fide Champions They won on a pure luck and were not able to dominate a single tournament after their wins>
What about Ponomariov?? Is he considered to be weak too?> Not really but I won't rush to say that his resume compares to Kramnik Kasparov or the champions that came before them. In that kind of company Pono gets lost in the shuffle fast even though he's a tough player. |
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| Jun-20-12 | | Petrosianic: Khalifman was the World #32 in January 2000, and Kasim was World #54 (!!) when he won the FIDE Title. By comparison, Pono was in the Top 10 or 20, which is fantastic by comparison, but he still had no real claim to being the world's best player. He won a lottery tournament, didn't beat the best, and avoided a match with the best. He's a tough player, of course, most people in the Top 20 are. (This whole question of "Was he the world champion, or was he weak?" is a wild faulty dilemma fallacy). But that doesn't make one world champion. The only FIDE Champion with any plausible claim to being the best was Anand. He was World #2 when he won the title. But again, a) his title wasn't undisputed, and b) he didn't beat anyone in particular to win it. Calling him world champion would be like naming Fischer world champion by virtue of sweeping the US Championship. |
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Jun-20-12
| | dx9293: Khalifman himself said that he didn't claim to be the strongest player in the World, but he claimed to be World Champion, because he won the only World Championship that there was at the time. He was right. |
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Jun-20-12
| | dx9293: In former days, and in Fischer's time, there was a World Championship system, so no one would claim Fischer the World Champion by winning the US Championship (which was infinitely weaker than the Soviet Championship anyway). |
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| Jun-20-12 | | Petrosianic: <because he won the only World Championship that there was at the time. He was right.> He was wrong. The title was disputed at the time and pretty much everyone except FIDE itself regarded the FIDE title as the less credible of the two, simply because the last undisputed champion still held the other one. |
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| Jun-20-12 | | Petrosianic: But on the other hand, there's nothing bad to say about Khalifman per se. He played chess, he won a tournament. The world organization called it a world championship. He's not lying when he says that they did. It's maybe a slight fudge to say that that was the only championship in existence, but we can massage that statement a bit to make it technically true. Khalifman certainly didn't do anything wrong by playing and winning. |
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Jan-18-13
| | talisman: happy birthday. |
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| Jan-18-13 | | cunctatorg: Alexander Khalifman is (or was...; it's up to him of course!) one of the most original, ingenious, resourceful and impressive chess-players I've ever seen. |
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| Jan-20-13 | | gars: As a confirmed chess rabbit I shall not engage in any kind of judgement about Khalifman's qualifications for the World Championhip. I prefer to see him as a very strong player who spent a lot of time and effort to author or co-author books about Chigorin, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botninnik, Tal and Shirov, besides books about the openings Anand and Kramnik use. |
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