Mig 
Greengard's ChessNinja.com

Aeroflot, Aerofrance

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There are only two rounds left to go in this massive display of chess power, the Aeroflot Open. (An entirely absurd website, yet again.) Yet another Ukrainian is in the lead, 23-year-old Pavel Eljanov. (Did you notice that three of the players in the Cuernavaca young masters event were Ukrainian? Only Azerbaijan has similar junior power.) Eljanov is a true open warrior, traveling Europe the way American GMs go from Vegas to Philly and back. His 5.5/7 may not hold up considering the array of Elo right behind him. Top seeds Mamedyarov, Akopian, and Sasikiran are in the group on 5.

Doug pointed out that among these heavyweights is Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, the 15-year-old French hope. He's the 84th seed in the Aeroflot but he's on an impressive run. He hasn't lost a game and he has wins over Akobian, Sadvakasov, and Naiditsch. France has a former "youngest GM ever" in Bacrot, who hit the top ten last year. Without Vachier-Lagrave France has six players in the top 100. For comparison, Germany and England have just two each, the Netherlands has four, the USA has five (four active). This happened just when the strong French events Cap d'Agde and Enghien les Bains have disappeared (?). C'est la vie!

29 Comments

It seems Cap d'Agde will reappear this year...

Dear Mig,
We hope Aerofrance is just beginning to take off ! This might not please GM Yermolinski, who wrote some absolute disgusting things about France and Frenchmen on your site, a few months ago. By the way, we are not ready to forget these offensive remarks, but as the guy says he wishes never to come to France, we just hope this is gonna be true.
Back to the subject of this comment, to confirm that the magnificent Cap d'Agde tournament will be reborn in (end of) October 2006.
Regards.
Laurent Vérat
Executive Director
French Chess Federation

Mig, I am not sure why Yermolinsky got brought into this thread, but can you link to his comments if you recall where they were?

Thanks

On the FIDE database, ALL chess players with a rating are listed as French!

If the don't correct it, will be a one-sided Olympiad.

4100018 Kasparov, Garry g FRA 2812 0 1963 M
2900084 Topalov, Veselin g FRA 2801 0 1975 M
5000017 Anand, Viswanathan g FRA 2792 0 1969 M
2000016 Fischer, Robert J g FRA 2780 0 1943 M i
4102142 Svidler, Peter g FRA 2765 0 1976 M
13300474 Aronian, Levon g FRA 2752 0 1982 M
4101588 Kramnik, Vladimir g FRA 2741 0 1975 M
703303 Leko, Peter g FRA 2740 0 1979 M
14100010 Ivanchuk, Vassily g FRA 2729 0 1969 M
2805677 Gelfand, Boris g FRA 2723 0 1968 M
14103320 Ponomariov, Ruslan g FRA 2723 0 1983 M
4116992 Morozevich, Alexander g FRA 2721 0 1977 M
4126025 Grischuk, Alexander g FRA 2717 0 1983 M
605506 Bacrot, Etienne g FRA 2717 0 1983 M
700070 Polgar, Judit g wg FRA 2711 0 1976 F w
2209390 Shirov, Alexei g FRA 2709 0 1972 M
13401319 Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar

France is a wonderful country and the French people are great. I learned some French language in college. I love the language. My daughter took French from middle school and did wonderfully in French. She also spent a summer in Franch. her first word upon coming home was AWESOME. she loves France.

I am not French. but I can love them and their culture.

I read what Yermo wrote about the French. Whenever I hear or read complaints I always know it is simply someone judging themselves. It is impossible to judge another person. we are all ONE. therefore my brother is me. and if I complain about my brother than I am really complaining about myself.

Yermo is only showing his deep inner problems that need healing. Loving Yermo is the way to help him to heal. but always remembering that his words are never about the French. his words are always and only about the healing he needs inside of himself. As I read Yermos words I hear him shouting out. "Please Love Me. I am in pain. I am a victim. I need to be loved."

so let us not judge Yermo or we will only be judging ourself again.

Peace and Spiritual Love

Tommy

Tommy,

What a condescending and insulting post.

Argue with Yermo about France if you like, but please spare us your dimestore psychobabble.

It's time to fess up. I am not french, but I am responsible for some of the wave of french hating...

Long ago I was at a cafe in Paris, reading the Herald Tribune (the english newspaper of Paris), when this hand gently squashes down the top of my newspaper and this guy asks "How do we get to the Orsay museum?". No excuse me, please or anything (and they say the french are arrogant)...

I took a deep breath and controlled my natural instincts because right behind the guy and his wife was a large sign with a helpful arrow pointing to the Musée d'Orsay. Museum -Musée, c'mon guy it's not that much of a stretch. Needless to say I gave him my best smile and directed the two of them to the opposing compass point to that indicated on the sign.

No doubt the guy went home and told all his kith and kin of the evils of french people, even the ones that read english newspapers. From little acorns etc etc

P.S. Nice pickup abc, funny.

Greg, I didn't find what Tommy wrote condescending or insulting at all. In fact, if anything, it's humbling. Had you replied to Yermolinski's post in such a manner, that I could have understood.

If Mr. Yermolinsky does not like France he is of course free to not go to France. I do not like him and so I am free no to buy any product endorsed by him. Period. I am not going to hurt his economy anymore than he is going to hurt the french economy by not travelling there.

I have been to France a couple of times and worked with three french colleagues, vey nice people. As anywhere else, I have found the whole spectrum: from the very rude to the very nice, and I do not speak french very well. I remember the lady at the front desk in a 20 Euro per night hostel on Rue Rivoli in Paris, really going the extra mile trying to tell me (myself: no french, she: no english or spanish) if I wanted an alarm clock for my very early next morning departure.
Of course it would be an idle exercise remembering that western civilization owes a great deal to the french, in more than one area of human knowledge.

By the way, we mexicans do not require a visa to enter France, but I every time I go to the US I have to go through an immigration officer who seems convinced that my only objective in life is to get into his country to work illegaly and makes me feel like I am a criminal of some sort.

Kiril Georgiev is in fantastic form lately. Winning Gibraltar with 8.5/10 and now co-leading the Aeroflot tournament with 6/8. That's 14.5/18, superb stuff!

If judging an entire nation is wrong, then it's equally wrong-headed to say "The French are wonderful people" as it is to say "The French are arrogant pr*cks."

Oh, and can I get some of whatever it is Tommy's smoking?

I am not going to be PC here, becuase that is what Yermo likes. I think *ALL* Russians are racist because one of them shot Cosby's son. How about that?

How did this thread so quickly become a competition to see who could be the bigger moron? Please hold it somewhere else. If you can't talk about the Aeroflot or French chess, start your own message board thread to share these profound thoughts. Thanks ever so much.

How? Ironically, Mr. Verat (the French federation ED) actually started it, by needlessly calling attention to Yermo's rant -- which hadn't appeared on this thread, which appeared EIGHT months ago (!!), and which no one (certainly not I) would ever have found out about otherwise.

Yet another proof that the right way to deal with jerks is to simply ignore their attention-seeking posts.

I think I'm going to follow my own advice and stop reading Dirt altogether. Then again, if everyone followed it, Mig wouldn't have a board. That's an irony too, since Mig is invariably sensible and fair-minded himself.

Guess it's another example of what us economists call "the law of unintended consequences."

It's more about not being led into temptation. You can just not read the comments, of course. But the will is weak...

Bye the way. Alexandra Kostiniuk won today. nice game. She beat someone 105 elo points higher than her. I hope she wins her last game tomorrow. nice going Alexandra. she now has 5 points out of 8 and is one of the leaders near the top. I am sure her tournament performance rating is well over her rating. her game today is well worth going over.

By the way, I still haven't read any apology from the French federation concerning last year's tragedy in Belfort. And they even have the nerve to suggest their representative as a candidate president for ...FIDE!

Yermo may be politically incorrect but he indeed had a point in his other post.

Mig,

What makes the Aeroflot website absurd in your opinion? I've seen nicer sites, but you can find all the things you want pretty easily it seems to me (albeit you need to know what round it is).

The chessbase guys seem to like it and it does have a nice feature or two.

Obviously it does not share the same design philosophy as this guy http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm (well worth a look), but I'm interested in what gets it to the absurd level in your view.

Cheers (and hope you had fun in the snow).

I have had a few glitches when trying to use the java viewer on the aeroflot website. It displays the board and the games but sometimes some pieces seem to be missing. The last time I checked, the two black knights were missing from the start of the games. Anyone else experienced this?

It's not even about the bugs or the cross-platform/browser incompatibilities, just function and navigation. Results in a scanned flash viewer you have to enlarge to the point where it won't fit into the viewer. I have to move the page back and forth or open in a new browser. Results and standings separated across two documents (A1, A2). Dead links everywhere, many to rounds that haven't been played yet. No way to find out the current round or schedule.

This site has been a pioneer of horrible ideas for years. They are the ones who, instead of PGN, scanned in all the scoresheets one year (no longer, thank god). Now we have PDFs of the printed wall charts in Flash viewers instead of html tables. It's like an entire retro concept of information display. Next they'll be showing a photograph of each move of each game.

Mig why do you want to stop the progress ?
Are you a Nataf friend ?
And they say that the Aeroflot web designer is a Frenchman : is it true ?

Ha, that was a nice posting about Aerofrance.

As the Yermolinski's polemic, disliking an entire country is not suble -- but I'm even more surprised the FFE executive director would get angry about one of his posts on a blog (however prestigious). Sounds like overreacting.

As for the Aeroflot, unfortunatly Maxime lost a game against Jakovenko, and today recovered by winning another. So this should make him shared 5th-place or something with 6.0/9 (the shared first is 6.5/9). Still an excellent result considering his age and his 2542-rating :-).
[I second the rant about Aeroflot site: HTML has tables well integrated with the browser - why invent some tables badly integrated with it?].

Our (the French) best chance is still Bacrot, who recently was in the top ten. But, unlike the smaller generation born in years 78-82 - there are also now at least 4 super-GMs/potential super-GMs of the same "generation 82-84": Ponomariov, Aronian, Grischuk, Mamedyarov (and Vallejo-Pons, and many others...). Can one of them reach 1st or 2nd place ?

Anyway, soon, will start another moment of truth for many players, at a rejuvenated Linares.

Sorry, Tommy, helping the healing is all up to you, you won't get a lot of help on this one.

"Loving Yermo is the way to help him to heal".

What an incredible reversal in the last round Eljanov choked(Mig's call), Kiril Georgiev lost and Bologan who stood at even after 5 rounds wins his next four games to tie for first. Up and comer Baadur Jobava wins the tournament. He seems to have all of the right ingredients and routinely has good results and games but his ELO never goes up. I don't get it.

Vachier's 2775 TPR was actually 2nd best in the tournament (after Sasikiran), one point ahead of winner Jobava.

Sorry for the OT, but I have posted scant info plus the second round pairings of the top section at http://tinyurl.com/cymdf for the Morelia open (Linares junior!?).

Sorry, it´s brief, I have to get back to my charges. Mig, please move this or put it where it would make more sense.

Jonathan Berry

And now the pairings for tomorrow´s 4th round.
http://tinyurl.com/cymdf

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    This page contains a single entry by Mig published on February 15, 2006 2:16 AM.

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