I am leaving on a chess plane...

Alexandra Kosteniuk's Chess News & Trivia (c) 2010

Hotel in Khanty-Mansiysk

Hello Everyone,

We found this lovely description of a ride on a "chess plane". Vladimir Barsky wrote this interesting piece on the Russian Chess Federation website. You can read the original in Russian here.

"I must admit, I’ve never before had the chance to fly on a “chess” plane. The Boeing 757 was boarded by 220 passengers, and they were all heading for the Olympiad. To the right of the author of these lines was Grandmaster Vladimir Tukmakov, to the left, Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin and Grandmaster Eduardas Rozentalis, in front Grandmasters Pavel Eljanov and Alexander Moiseenko, and they were all together reading the latest issue of 64 with Ruslan Ponomariov in a pink shirt on the cover. An incredible feeling! While there was also Ruslan himself, but he wasn’t reading and seemed to be asleep, as was Peter Svidler: at the back of the aircraft the Ukrainian girls had organized a lighthearted battle of Mafia. On board were two male and two female Russian teams, as well as Ukraine, USA, Lithuania… Suddenly I came up with a strange idea – to calculate the average rating of the airplane. It’s true that it was slightly spoiled by the teams of Jamaica and Nigeria, the plane crew and a series of unidentified teams and FIDE officials, but even the journalists were almost all grandmasters: Elya Mirzoeva, Yana Melnikov, Sergey Zagrebelny. No doubt all considered you’ve have ended up with a minimum of 2250-2300."

You can find the nice English translation and more at chessintranslation.com.

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