Chess Take Center Stage in Baku
With technical problems solved, Teimour Radjabov's
amazing skill shines in semis
By Sarah Hurst
[Sarah Hurst is on
the scene in Baku for
KasparovChess.com
and we thank both her and
Tim Wall for helping
the Radjabovs and us get
through the problems
that plagued Teimour's first
round games.]
Teimour Radjabov
It was an enormous relief for Teimour
Radjabov to be able to play the semi-final without any technical problems.
The match took place at the headquarters of AzEuroTel, Azerbaijan's leading
telecoms company, to whom we are extremely grateful. They provided a quiet
room for Teimour and a larger one for family, arbiters and avid AzEuroTel
chess fans to watch the match on the KasparovChess site.
Teimour himself was very tired from
the previous few days' efforts and in no mood to answer questions; at the
beginning of the second game he even waved his dad out of the room. He
didn't express any
emotion until he had finally won the match, at which
point he was all
smiles. The attitudes of Boris and Layla, Teimour's parents,
were quite
contrasting. Layla sat calmly reading a magazine while
Boris grumbled
throughout that Teimour was losing and wouldn't even
let Fritz convince him that Teimour was in no danger towards the end of
the second game. "There's a tournament every month, I don't worry any more,"
Layla said. "When he was younger he used to make awful mistakes, suddenly
giving a piece away, and that was stressful, but now he's much more solid."
Teimour seemed slightly surprised that
Vladimir Belov was falling so far behind on time, asking at one point,
"Is that his real time?", as the
technical problems in the previous match had put the
clocks out of synch. Indeed, Murugan Thiruchelvam, Teimour's previous opponent,
managed his 60 minutes much more successfully. But one of the reasons for
Vladimir's time problems, was, of course, the problems Teimour was setting
him on the board, especially the task of pulling a win out of the bag in
game two, which never looked likely.
Teimour is much more enthusiastic about
this tournament now that he has played a glitch-free match and is bound
to raise his game again
for the final. He was in bed with flu before the match
with Murugan, and had no time to prepare for the semi-final because of
the postponed game, but he has two whole days to prepare for the next match.
"Getting to the final is great, even if you're the runner-up," Boris told
him encouragingly. "No, you want to be the champion," Tim Wall said. Teimour
didn't disagree.
-- SH
