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Bob Armstrong
09-21-2010, 10:40 PM
Published on InsideToronto.com, Sept. 21, A.M. by Tim Foran ( in the Sports Section ! ); this article has also been featured on the very popular Susan Polgar Blog.


North Yorkers Head Canada's National Chess Teams

Erase the image of two crafty old men sitting across a chess board and slowly strategizing their moves. The reality of Canada's competitive game is drastically different.

Two North Yorkers, Yuanling Yuan and Mark Bluvshtein, both of whom shot to the top of Canada's rankings at age 14, will lead the country's youngest ever women's and national chess teams respectively over the next two weeks at the 39th annual Chess Olympiad, the first round of which began play Tuesday, September 21.

Yuanling Yuan, a 16-year-old high school student at Victoria Park C.I. and Canada's top rated female player at year end in both 2008 and 2009, will play "first board", or leader, for Canada's five-person women's team.

"She's the youngest first board on the women's team that Canada has ever sent," said Bob Armstrong, governor for the Chess Federation of Canada, which is one of approximately 150 federations sending their nation's top players to the Olympiad in Khanty-Mansiysk, a small city in western Siberia. The Olympiad is a biannual affair attracting the world's top talent and organized by the international chess federation FIDE. Canada's two teams are both ranked in the fifties.

Despite Yuan's age, this will actually be her second Olympiad, as she also played in the last one in 2008 in Dresden, Germany.

Leading Canada's national team this year is Mark Bluvshtein, 22, a recent York University graduate and Newtonbrook Secondary School alumnus. This will be the fifth Olympiad for Bluvshtein, who became Canada's youngest ever grandmaster at the age of 16.

International masters Thomas Roussel-Roozman, 22, Leonid Gershoy, 22, and Artiom Samsonkin, 21, round out the starting squad for the national team, while Nikolay Noritsyn, 19, is the team's reserve, a position that generally sees quite a bit of playing time, said Armstrong.

The women's team is even younger. Both starter Yelizaveta Orlova and reserve Dalia Kagramanov are only 16, while Kagramanov's older sister, Dina, another York University grad, is the "elder" on Canada's teams at the age of 24. The other starter Iulia Lacau-Rodean is 22.

"There has been quite an explosion of youth in the chess world," explained Armstrong, a description underscored by the emergence of Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, 19, who at the beginning of this year became the youngest player in history to be ranked number one.

Armstrong said an increase in the number of outlets for chess players to compete and the presence of coaching at the younger levels has enabled the growth of young stars.

"They're improving quickly and Canada is showing the results of that," he said.

Bluvshtein, who was born in Russia and lived in Israel for several years before moving to Canada in 1999, is only one of three competitive Canadian grandmasters. However, the other two now live and work outside the country and declined to participate in the Olympiad, said Armstrong.

The Olympiad, an 11-round competition running until October 3, kicked off in an opening ceremony Monday which included a live, costumed re-enactment of the "Immortal Game", of 1851, during which Adolf Anderssen checkmated opponent Lionel Kieseritzky despite sarcificing his rooks, a bishop and his queen.

Bob Gillanders
09-21-2010, 11:41 PM
Great article......and Inside Toronto ran it in their Sports section! :)

Excellent! :D

Kerry Liles
09-23-2010, 09:40 AM
Great article......and Inside Toronto ran it in their Sports section! :)

Excellent! :D

Can be found online here:

http://www.insidetoronto.com/sports/article/876140--north-yorkers-head-canada-s-national-chess-teams