Saturday 24 April 2010

No Russian at WCC Match

At Street Chess today there was a brief discussion about the following question. "When was the last Chess World Championship Match (before the 2010 match) when neither player was a native Russian speaker?"
The best answer we could come up with was way back in 1921, when Capablanca played Lasker. Of course this assumes that players like Ivanchuk and Ponomariov (who played in the 2002 FIDE World Championship Final) fall into the category of 'native' Russian speakers.
Have I missed anything obvious? Did any matches between 1921 and 2010 contain only non-Russian speakers? Contributions welcome.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I noticed that too in my info post of last week, where I described it as "the first match since Capablanca-Lasker (1921) in which no Soviet or Russian player is involved".

http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/anand-topalov-all-the-info/