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Aeroflot Open Moskau 2003
February 10 to 20, 2003
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The tournament itself takes place in the Hotel Rossija, which has 2876 rooms
and is considered the largest hotel in the world. It is only 200 meters from
the Kremlin. The tournament is very strong, with the top seeds being Alexander
Grischuk and Peter Svidler. Here's
the full list of participants.
The tournaments will be held from February 10 to 20. The first day of play
is the 11th, the last (ninth) round is on the 19th. The games begin at 15:00h
local time, on the last day at 10 a.m.
Three Alexanders at the press conference: Roschal, Zurabov und Bakh.
Guest of honour ex world champion Vassily Smyslov
The cream of the Moscow journalistic community was present at the press confrerence
Vassily Smyslov held the opening speech and spoke about the relations of the
generations and the fact that Moscow has always been the center of the chess
world. "Just look around you," he said, "how many journalists
are here, and how many pretty women!"
The conference proceeds wht the ritual severing of Pepsi
A novelty which will be tested during this tournament: instead of publishing
boring machine-readable ChessBase or PGN files the organisers want to post GIFs
of the original scoresheets. Hmmm...
At the end of the press conference there was a banquette in the Tschigorin
hall. The tables were bursting under the weight of the food and drinks served
there [the original Russian text seems to imply that a table actually collapsed].
The drinks consisted of Pepsi and a Karpov Jubilee Vodka (for Tolya's 50th).
Fotos:
Eugeny Atarov ("64")
Mail: info@joeblack.ru
