16 January 2016

Visiting the Siberian Tale

Pavel Maletin tells about the 1st training session of the RCF grandmaster center Siberian.

On January 10 the 1st training session of the RCF grandmaster center "Siberian", organized in the Novokuznetsk Region of the Kemerovo Oblast at the premises of the children's educational and health center "Siberian Tale", came to an end. The session was carried out by the international grandmasters Aleksander Riazantsev (Moscow), Pavel Maletin (Novosibirsk), Andrei Belozerov (Tomsk), Vladimir Nevostrujev (Kemerovo) and the International Masters Dmitry Sitnikov (Novokuznetsk) and Antonina Trofimova (Kemerovo).

The gifted players from the Altai and the Krasnoyarsk regions as well as from the Sverdlovsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk and the Kemerovo oblasts were split up into five training groups, each featuring 8-11 students. Each group followed an individual program prepared by coaches. Meanwhile, during these ten days the juniors were offered additional individual consultations, tests on tactics, chess composition studies and the games of classical players.

The first group was trained by the Russian national women's team coach grandmaster Alexander Riazantsev. The second group was coached by grandmaster Pavel Maletin, while grandmaster Andrei Belozerov was in charge of the third one. Three times a day grandmaster Vladimir Nevostrujev was busy conducting individual sessions with 2-3 chess players not from the "grandmaster groups" only, but also with the children studying in the groups of international masters.

On the evening of January 7 the grandmaster center hosted a Christmas blitz tournament. The tournament "A" was won by Andrey Belozerov, with Dmitry Anikonov taking second and Semen Khanin and Vladimir Nevostrujev sharing the third and fourth places. The "B" tournament was won by Mikhail Bazhenov, with the second and the third places going to Grigoriy Fedotov and Vyacheslav Shabalin respectively.

The last day of the training session saw Vladimir Nevostrujev giving a simul. It was only Andrey Komarov who managed to get the upper hand of the simul-giver, whereas Agatha Murzina and Nadezhda Nikolaeva ended their games in draws.

The main goal of the "grandmaster" groups was getting all school students through as many training assignment as possible so that there was no need in determining the best as is usually the case with the summer sessions.

However, in the groups headed by the International Masters Dmitry Sitnikov and Antonina Trofimova the coaches still singled out the best kids as a means of giving them additional incentive to continue improving further, them being Vyacheslav Shabalin, Mikhail Bazhenov, Maksim Funk, Yaroslav Petukhov, Andrey Starkov, Ivan Malyshev and Dmitry Lyapin. Should the children go on to demonstrate their best qualities in the future, they will be able to go over into the "grandmaster" groups before long.

Along with the 1st session of the grandmaster center there took place a working meeting of the organizing committee and the coaching staff, at which a decision to set up own grandmaster center’s website was adopted and short/long term plans established. In particular, it is planned to significantly "strengthen" the team of coaches for future sessions and to bring the center’s performance to a more advanced level in terms of its material, technical and tutorial aspects.

It should be noted that the next session of the grandmaster center is scheduled to be carried out in the Altai region in March this year.