Post
by John Cox » Thu Sep 08, 2022 12:26 am
>By the way, I have felt that Ramirez' simpering questions to other players of "you are playing Niemann in round x, this must be very unsettling for you and how are you handling it?" have been beyond disgusting
Strange thing to say. Why? It obviously may be unsettling and it's interesting to know how players deal with it: he's a journalist and he's supposed to ask questions the public want an answer to. There's not much point in pretending that Magnus didn't think Niemann was cheating - if that wasn't what he meant; he'd surely have said so by now - and the other players' reactions are something the public is going to be interested in.
Like someone above, I've met Alejandro and he struck me as a responsible and pleasant guy. In my opinion the entire commentary team have dealt with this well.
On another theme, I'm finding all these references to Carlsen-So really odd. This line with ...d5 and dxc4 is different from the Nf3 c5 g3 stuff and AFAIK there aren't even any transpositions. Maybe I'm wrong about that; I'd be interested to hear from anyone better informed. In Carlsen-So White didn't play g3 until after Nf3 c5, so he wasn't offering the gambit implicit in g3 d5; Nf3. On the other hand, Carlsen has certainly played the g3 d5; Nf3 stuff before, by transposition, in the rather famous game Carlsen-Adams from 2006 (maybe the Olympiad?). Given that a punter like me knows this without consulting a database, I'm finding some of, for instance, Nakamura's online stuff a little, shall we say, under-researched. Niemann made a lot more sense talking about how he asked himself what ideas Magnus could come up with to throw him off base in the Catalan line he planed to play with ,,,Bb4+ and decided to check 5 Nc3, a rare Nimzo transposition.