EUGENE, Ore.
http://www.bearsrookiestore.com/Bears-Kevin-White-Jersey/
. -- A top-10 VERT Challenge showdown between No. 1 Nebraska and No. 10 Florida
Friday in Eugene did not disappoint. The Huskers took home the season-opening
3-1 win at Matthew Knight Arena, but a young Gators team rallied to win the
first set 27-25 and, despite the loss, will take plenty of lessons and notes as
it moves forward.There is a reason they are the preseason No. 1-ranked team,
Florida head coach Mary Wise said. Theyre very efficient and low error. It was
the first time Shainah Joseph has played the O2, first time Caroline Knop has
worn the libero jersey, first start for Taelor Kellum, the first time Allie
Gregory, Darrielle King, Morgyn Greer, Rachael Kramer and Chanelle Hargreaves
have played in a college match. Thats a lot of firsts against the defending
national champions. Were an awfully young team to go toe-to-toe with such an
experienced team this early in the season.Gator veteran pin hitters Alex Holston
and Carli Snyder combined for 34 kills and 25 digs - Snyder posting a
double-double (16k, 16d), while Holston slammed down a team-leading 18 kills and
was one scoop shy (9) of a double-double. Team captain Rhamat Alhassan, who
enters her junior season at the University of Florida as the active career
leader in the NCAA in hitting efficiency (.437) and is tied for second in career
blocks per set (1.47), chipped in 10 kills against Nebraska.Florida redshirt
sophomore setter Allie Monserez dished out a career high 49 assists and Knop
joined Snyder with double-digit digs (11). King (3) and Greer (1) had their
first career kills while Gregory (6) and Hargreaves (1) contributed digs in
their first UF matches.It took extra points in the first for a 27-25 Gators set
win, highlighted by seven kills from Holston, plus seven digs and four kills for
Snyder, and was sealed with a block from Alhassan and Joseph. The Huskers went
on to close out the match with three consecutive set wins: 25-15, 25-16 and
25-21. Florida battled in the fourth, narrowing the Nebraska lead, 22-20, but
the defending champion Huskers prevailed.
http://www.bearsrookiestore.com/Bears-Leonard-Floyd-Jersey/
. -- Most satisfying to Russ Smith about No.
http://www.bearsrookiestore.com/Bears-Cameron-Meredith-Jersey/
. Gerald Green and Miles Plumlee? Green had bounced around the NBA when he wasnt
playing overseas. The Pacers gave up on Plumlee after just one season. Now Green
and Plumlee are key cogs in the Suns surprising breakout season.
http://www.bearsrookiestore.com/Bears-Walter-Payton-Jersey/
. Scott Kazmir allowed four hits in seven shutout innings, Michael Brantley hit
a two-run homer in a three-run first inning and the Indians maintained their
hold on an AL wild-card spot with a 4-1 win over the Houston Astros on Saturday
night. On September 29, 2007, in Mexico City, India conquered the
world.Seventeen days earlier, eight elite chess players had gathered there to
play a gruelling double round-robin tournament. Each player would play all the
others twice, once each with white and black. Fourteen rounds against elite
opposition. Such super-grandmaster tournaments were common, but this one was
special, not just because of the strength of the field assembled but because the
winner would be crowned the undisputed world champion of Chess. Therefore,
unlike in other tournaments, only first place mattered. There would be blood on
this dance floor.At the end of 14 rounds, one man remained unbeaten. Viswanathan
Anand of India had ten draws and four wins to his credit, and with nine points
out of 14, won the tournament by a full point. Anand, at 37 years of age, was
among the older world champions in what was increasingly becoming a young mans
game. He was no journeyman, though, but one of the greatest talents in the
history of chess, who, as a young prodigy in the late 80s and early 90s, had
threatened to be the first man after Bobby Fischer to challenge the Soviet
School of Chess. It is impossible to overstate what a monumental achievement
this was.***Vladimir Lenin enjoyed playing chess, but institutional support for
chess in the Soviet Union had less to do with love of the game and more to do
with ideology and geopolitics. Nikolai Krylenko, a senior functionary and the
head of the Soviet chess association (until he was purged by Stalin in 1938),
once said: We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must
condemn once and for all the formula chess for the sake of chess, like the
formula art for arts sake. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and
begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.Chess was taught in
schools, and chess players received special dispensation from the regime. In
1927 they even had a world champion in Alexander Alekhine. But Alekhine turned
against the Bolsheviks and left for France, whom he represented in the 1930s. It
was after World War II that the Soviet School of Chess really took off.One of
the imperatives of the Cold War was that the Soviets had to find ways to
demonstrate that their vision of the world was superior to that of the
capitalist, decadent West. Chess was an obvious domain. Alekhine had died in
1946, but around half of the best players in the world were Soviet. A five-man
quintuple round-robin tournament was held in 1948 to decide the World
Championship; three of the participants were Soviet. Their chosen man, Mikhail
Botvinnik, won easily. Botvinnik became a central figure in the decades-long
Soviet domination of chess that followed. Indeed, his work ethic and his values
formed the template for the Soviet School.The School placed an emphasis on
preparation, both mental and physical. In 1926, the scrawny 15-year-old
Botvinnik found himself running out of energy during games, and on his mothers
advice, began a daily exercise routine to raise his fitness levels. (Intense
concentration at a chess board can take up a surprising amount of energy, and
stamina matters.) Physical fitness became a credo for the Soviet School. Far
more impressive, though, was the work they put into theoretical preparation.The
key skill in chess is not calculation but pattern recognition. A famous study by
Adriaan de Groot in 1946 found that grandmasters dont actually calculate more
moves ahead than novice players. They just calculate the right ones. This is
because what they see on the chessboard is not just a collection of pieces but a
collection of existing patterns and possible patterns, all with their own
characteristics and weaknesses. The more they study and play the game, the more
patterns they understand, with greater depth and subtlety.The Soviet School
began training schoolkids in the basic principles of chess, exposing them
systematically to an increasing number of patterns, and teaching them basic
heuristics to help them deal with common situations. This gave Soviet players an
enormous edge over others who did not have this training. Insights that others
had to labour to achieve were intuitive for them.?Others such as a kid growing
up in India in the 1980s, before the advent of computers, with no access to the
kind of information and training that the Soviets had.Devangshu Datta, a writer
who played serious chess in the 1980s, and knows Anand well, once told me: When
I started playing East Europeans [in the 80s], the difference in chess culture
was stark. We knew so much less, it wasnt funny. To take an analogy, it was like
putting a bunch of talented kids with a basic knowledge of, say, self-taught HSC
level maths into direct competition with people who had post-grad math
degrees.Wed struggle through the opening and hit the middle game and start
wondering what to do, then in the post-mortem, the opponent would say, Oh, my
trainer AN Other taught us that with this structure you have to play this way,
and youd be like, Shit.For Anand to come out of this environment and establish
himself as an elite player was mind-boggling. He did not have the mental toolkit
that Soviet players did, and had to figure it out on the fly. Think of it as
playing Wimbledon today with the kind of wooden racket they used 30 years ago;
or, as I like to say, taking a Maruti 800 into a Formula One championship and
actually competing for the title. What manner of special talent does it take to
do that?***Appearances can be deceptive in chess. If you look at Anand, you see
a polite, sedately dressed conventional Tamilian gentleman - but his chess style
was something apart from this. Think of him as the Viv Richards of chess -
flamboyant, attacking, pulling off moves that would leave his opponents in awe.
Anand was known in his early days for his creative, attacking play, and he also
played quickly, often taking minutes on the clock where others would take more
than an hour. He didnt only have attacking strokes in his arsenal, though. He
was what is known as a universal player: comfortable in all kinds of positions,
with no weaknesses in his game.The chess world that Anand set foot into as a
teenager in the late 1980s was a bipolar one - and both the poles were Soviet.
Anatoly Karpov, the blue-eyed boy of the Soviet establishment, had become woorld
champion in 1975 by default after Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title
against him.
http://www.bearsrookiestore.com/Bears-Adrian-Amos-Jersey/.
(Some say Fischer was scared he would lose to this phenomenal young talent.)
Karpov was a positional genius, and his style was likened to that of a boa
constrictor, squeezing with precise, quiet moves till there was no life left in
his opponent. Garry Kasparov, who beat him for the World Championship in 1985,
and in a series of epic matches after that, was an unreal talent. He combined
the strong points of every world champion before him, and unlike Anand, his
personality matched his playing style: relentlessly attacking, uncompromising,
fearless. (He would later battle Vladimir Putin with the same ferocity with
which he took down Karpov.) Kasparov was the rebel to Karpovs establishment man
persona - but both were solid products of the Soviet school, and both had been
personally trained by Botvinnik.Anand won the World Junior Championship in 1987,
but his big breakthrough to the elite level came in 1991, when he won a strong
super-grandmaster round-robin tournament in Reggio Emilia. He finished ahead of
Kasparov (whom he beat with black), Karpov, and upcoming superstars Boris
Gelfand and Vassily Ivanchuk. For the first time since Fischer, the domination
of the Soviet School of Chess was threatened by an outsider.***Anands quest to
be world champion was complicated by a split in the chess world in 1993. Garry
Kasparov fought with FIDE, the world chess body, over terms for his World
Championship match against Nigel Short, and Kasparov and Short quit to set up a
rival association, PCA, with its own World Championship matches. FIDE continued
holding World Championships without Kasparov. Anand qualified through a rigorous
process to play Kasparov for the PCA world title in 1995. They met in New York,
and after eight draws, Anand won the ninth game with a sparkling exchange
sacrifice. But Kasparov rebounded ferociously to win four of the next five games
to put the match away.Anands next shot was at the FIDE World Championship in
1997-98. Its format was absurd: 97 players would play in a month-long knockout
tournament in Groningen in the Netherlands, ending on December 30. And the
winner would immediately travel to Lausanne in Switzerland to play a match
against a fresh Karpov, who was seeded directly into the final, on January 2.
Anand won the knockout tournament, beating Michael Adams in the final match, but
was naturally drained by the effort. He later said that he was brought in a
coffin to play Karpov, and chess enthusiast Sreenivas Lakkineni was quoted as
saying that Anands condition was similar to a runner being asked to immediately
start a 100-metre race from the marathon finishing line. To his credit, Anand
drew the match 3-3, but lost the Rapid playoff.A couple of years later, in 2000,
Anand finally won the FIDE World Championship, triumphing over another 100-man
field in a knockout tournament. (Large-field knockout tournaments are very
high-variance, so winning two of them within three years was remarkable in
itself.) He wasnt the undisputed world champion, though, and craved a shot at
that title. The PCA had no qualification system in place, and Kasparov basically
picked who he wanted to play. That same year, he overlooked the World No. 2,
Anand, and picked fellow Russian Vladimir Kramnik for a World Championship
match. To everyones surprise, Kramnik beat Kasparov.The early 2000s were a
frustrating time for Anand. He had won one half of the world title, but the
other half was held by Kramnik, and Kasparov was still World No. 1. (Anand was
No. 2.) Anand won the World Rapid and Blitz titles (players get around 30
minutes each in Rapid and around five minutes each in Blitz) and also won a
series of super-GM tournaments. But the chess world was disorganised, and there
were no signs of a unified world championship. Kasparov retired in 2005, opting
to take on Putin on a larger chessboard. FIDE then got its act together and
organised a reunification match between Kramnik and the FIDE world champion at
the time, Veselin Topalov. Kramnik won, and was thereby the undisputed champion.
And the next year, for the first time since a 37-year-old Mikhail Botvinnik won
in 1948, a tournament (instead of a series of knockout matches) was held to
decide the new undisputed world champion.***For about four years starting in
2007, Anand played chess as well as anyone has in the games history. He was
World No. 1 now, and after winning the title with a solid performance in 2007,
he defended it in matches against Kramnik (2008), Topalov (2010) and Gelfand
(2012). His play in the matches against Kramnik and Topalov, in particular, was
as close to perfection as you can get, according to Datta.He ticked all the
boxes during this period, says Datta, and he showed his versatility as well,
adapting to his opponents styles. Anand embraced tactical complexity against
Kramnik but played with positional finesse against Topalov, practically toying
with both men. After all these years of being almost there, he was now regarded
as one of the greatest players to have ever played the game. Where does one
place Anand in the pantheon of Indian sport? Chess is played in many more
countries and by many more people than any other sport that Indians have
excelled in, and Anand has been at the pinnacle of the game for two and a half
decades. By this reckoning, he is incomparable. And his 2007 world title has
special meaning.Had the world championships never been unified, indeed had they
not been held at all, Anand would still have been a dominant player and perhaps
played games of the same quality. But sporting greatness is not just about how
well you play the game in a vacuum, but how well you play it under pressure.
Context matters. With his lifetimes dream within his grasp, to display the
solidity he showed in 2007, and then the versatility (and mastery of his
opponents) he did in the subsequent matches against Kramnik and Topalov, was
extraordinary - and so very unlikely. A soft-spoken Tamilian boy from India
taking down the Soviet School of Chess? Whod have thunk it?Amit Varma is a
writer based in Mumbai. He writes the blog India Uncut. Twitter: @amitvarma.
Wholesale NFL Jerseys Wholesale Nike NFL Jerseys NFL Jerseys From China Cheap Nike Basketball
Jerseys Wholesale Hockey
Jerseys China Nike
Baseball Jerseys Cheap
College Jerseys China Cheap
Football Jerseys Wholesale
Jerseys Canada Wholesale NHL
Jerseys Canada Wholesale Nike MLB
Jerseys Canada Cheap NBA Jerseys
Authentic Canada Stitched Soccer
Jerseys Canada Cheap Jerseys
Canada NFL ' ' '