It is difficult to define, which ‘Luebeck’s’ victory was the most
important one, but Shirov’s game was the real beauty of the super-match.
Then ‘Porz’ won the remaining 5 matches scoring 28 of 30
points, but that did not help much. Having scored 29 points, ‘Luebeck’
was the first. The champions sole failure was drawing 4:4 against
‘Baden-Os’.
It was the first season in Bundesliga for the Baden-Baden team. They
recruit Anand along with Svidler and Krasenkow. It seemed that the
club, which also featured Huebner and Dautov, was able to fight for
the best result in the tournament. However, the prognoses were refuted
by the course of events. It was a series of breakdowns for ‘Baden-Os’,
which resulted with the 8th prize. They even lost to ‘Neukeln’,
whose team included only one grandmaster! With rather overwhelming
advantage in rating, ‘Baden-Os’ failed to win even a single
game, having achieved 7 draws (one of them was Rogozenko – Anand)
and one defeat.
Apart from the bad luck, the reason for ‘Baden-Os’ failure
was that the last boards in the team were relatively weak players
– since the players rated 2500 fit into the super-club team rather
badly. ‘Baden-Os’ managed to win the German cup in this season,
the second tournament by its importance. The Baden Baden players’
potential is rather high.
Current regulations of Bundesliga do not restrict the number of players
from the European community countries. This mounts the Bundesliga’s
standards, but also gives a ground for the most severe criticism.
Too much angry voices in Germany call for restricting the number of
all foreigners. For example, grandmaster Stangl published an open
letter on this theme. Avoiding the discussion, one would nevertheless
note, that the present system diminishes chances of the players from
the ex-USSR countries comparing to those ones of their Western colleagues.
Meanwhile, by the present moment there are a lot of such players in
Bundesliga. The author was also one of them; but the last season happened
to be rather difficult for me.
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Games commented by GM A.Golubev
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