<tamar: You have to eliminate Armenian Petrosian, Ukrainians Geller and Stein, and Estonian Keres from consideration, also Latvian Tal, so are left with Spassky, Korchnoi, Smyslov and Polugaevsky...> I think that Polugaevsky should be eliminated too because I think he is Belarusian. But my idea was that many good players who never become popular were very strong (Kholmov, Bagirov, Platonov), but in thesen times if the communist party was not favourable to you, you could not achieve a lot, you didn't even have the opportunity to travel abroad if you didn't have the consent of the party, and the favourites of the regime were only few, Botvinnik, Petrosian, etc, and the vast majority of talented players could not develop their talents being in a severe isolation. I mean that in the sixties it was not as easy as now to make a name, to promote to the elite circle, and of course this concerned not only chess. Sometimes a loss meant terror, as was the case with Taimanov. There is no need to mention Tal, Korchnoi. So in these times you had to be the best to be given the chance to have an adequate chess career, and sometimes luck changed and your career was over. I have the impression that many player from the sixties are not well-known yet and that the quality of their chess is not worse than of the contemporary super grand masters, and what they achieved was not a result of ready-made computer chess analyses. Now things are easy, you just turn on the computer and you have innumerable games to explore and compare, you don't need to spend months to refute a line or a sacrifice, the engines do that almnost instantly. Yes, no one can tell what kind of a chess player Tal would have been if equipped with a little bit of artificial intelect (his natural one seemed to cope with chess quite well), or how Jakovenko would do if dropped in the sixties, would he be able to compete with Tukmakov, Boleslavsky, Smyslov. A very long post with only few claims, I am sorry, I just have the impression that after the Karpov era Russian chess is in constant decline, only Kramnik can be a real contender for the world chess crowm right now, while the other renowned Russian chess players- Svidler, Morozevich, Grischuk and Jakovenko seem to be quite far from having the chance to shoot for the title, while in the sexties at least five or six Russians were world class chess players and could be real contenders for climbing of the chess Olympus, and the decline of Russian chess can be seen most clearly maybe at the chess olympiads, where Russia struggles even for a medal place.

Jakovenko needs a breakthrough performance, but has been very cautious overall.

At San Luis Swidler shared second place with Anand and his score was +4, -1, =9, and his only loss was against Topalov, but at Mexico city he was fifth overall with +1 (the only win against the outsider Grischuk), 2 losses and the record 11 draws at that event. Recently Svidler has difficulties to keep steadily within the top ten players so I cannot regard him as a very strong contender for the title, but yes, Ponomariov and Kasimdzhanov have proved that every 2700+ player has some chances of becoming a world champion...

Though I agree that he's not one of the more frequent contributors to this kind of chess.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

compare this guy's humility to the arrogance of other super GM's

The simple conclusion is that Jako is especially tough to beat in a longer game, especially if he's playing white. An opponent's best chance to beat him is in a short game when Jako is black. This leads me to believe Jako is susceptible to opening novelties, which is probably true of all GMs, though perhaps more true of Jakovenko. The bottom line is you don't want to get into an endgame with Jakovenko, especially if he's playing the white pieces. You want to surprise him early. It would be interesting to see a match between Topalov and Jakovenko, a true contrast of styles. Topalov throws out the novelties. If Jako survives into a long endgame, he probably wins or draws. My guess is Topalov would probably win.

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