Sunday, March 02, 2008

Karjakin? Nakamura?

Dylan Loeb McClain, NY Times chess columnist, discussed on why Sergey Karjakin and Hikaru Nakamura are not being invited to top chess tournaments, like Corus and the ongoing Morelia Linares.


Dylan says:
Part of the reason is probably that Carlsen is the "sexier" story. Karjakin is from Eastern Europe, the traditional spawning ground for most top players, while Carlsen comes from an area of Western Europe with almost no history of world class players (other than Bent Larsen of Denmark). Being based in Western Europe helps Carlsen as most of the elite tournaments are also there and Western Europe certainly has a better developed media machine, so Carlsen naturally gets more press.


As for Nakamura, I personally wouldn't invite the player to slam my clocks like in coffeehouse chess.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Carlsen is the World Juniors' number 1 and World's number 13 according to the januari FIDE list. The fact that he ended on a shared first place at Corus seems to prove that the invitation was right.