Bareev on nerves and junior chess
While no longer the head coach of the Russian men’s team Evgeny Bareev still has an overall coaching role and talked to Dmitry Kryakvin of the Russian Chess Federation website about the upcoming World and European junior events. He noted Russia now had financial support for children’s chess from Gazprom, the main sponsor of the Tal Memorial. He also talked about the stresses of junior events.
Bareev said that Olga Girya’s recent experience in the World Junior Championship (she lost in the final round with White when a draw would have given her the gold medal) reminded him of his last appearance in the championship in Gausdal in 1986:
In the last game with White against Agdestein it turned out I only needed a draw. Granda Zuniga, who was my rival during the tournament, very quickly lost his game and Arencibia was half a point ahead. I got an extra pawn, and at that moment Anatoly Avraamovich Bykhovsky signalled to me that a draw was enough. My hands and legs started to shake, and I successfully lost that better position, shared 3rd place and didn’t make it onto the pedestal due to worse tiebreaks. Therefore I know what a test the World Championships are. In order to win a Swiss event you need to have experience and mental resilience. When children become champions and bring home medals people simply marvel at them. The only time I became World Champion it was a colossal stress. You give everything, but you obtain experience. Anyone can become a grandmaster with a certain amount of work, but not everyone’s capable of getting top results. You can’t have great victories without painful defeats.
So we need to wish our guys that their hands don’t shake?
That’s almost impossible. It would be good if even with shaking hands they get positions where they stop shaking. Or if they simply win with shaking hands.