The main heroine of the last European Championship in Chakvi, Natalia Zhukova, has spoken about the conflict that arose during the tournament. According to her, from the information that was published on our website, readers could get the wrong idea about what was happening in reality.
You will recall that after five rounds, the little-known chess player Mihaela Sandu of Romania had 5 points, prompting suspicions among some participants. According to Natalia, there were many more suspicious players than the fifteen signatures which later appeared on the letter. “This outstanding result came under scrutiny, this is not surprising – said the Ukrainian. – Cheating is one of the major problems in modern chess, the methods used are becoming more sophisticated and no check will help.”
In the sixth round the game Batsiashvili – Sandu (1-0) was disconnected from the live broadcast, but the next day’s game Sandu – Stefanova (1-0) was again broadcast live, although, according to Zhukova, Zurab Azmaiparashvili had promised Stefanova (who asked for it to be broadcast with a delay) he would disable or delay the broadcast, something he later denied. “Then the organizers argued that the game with Batsiashvili was disabled due to a technical problem, but we know very well that is wrong.”
Before writing the notorious letter, Zhukova claims she many times approached the chief arbiter Tomasz Delega and the organizers, with a request to delay the broadcast of the games. But in response, the latter required that a letter be written, requesting such action, else they would do nothing. “Maybe they were hoping that I would not want to spend time on preparation of the text. In fact, I would have loved to concentrate only on preparing for the game, but, alas, I had no choice.”
Before starting to collect signatures, Zhukova showed both letters to the chief arbiter. “If the text had been too drastic, we could have made adjustments. But there were no objections. And then later, Giorgadze’s reply claimed that the second letter was “offensive” and that we should withdraw our signatures from it.”
Full article here: http://chess-news.ru
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