Vasiukov Photo / Caruana's Career

This month the chess world lost another former Soviet star, Evgeni Vasiukov (1933-2018). I searched my archive of eBay material and found only a single item featuring him. It's still worth a post.

The description said,

Original Soviet chess press panoramic photo. Grandmaster Evgeni Vasiukov plays white against Grandmaster Mikhail Tal, 1970s. Retouched for publishing in Latvian chess magazine "Sahs".

I've cropped out the 'panoramic' aspect, which showed chess fans pressing in from all sides to watch the game, apparently played at blitz time control. For more about his career, see Evgeni Vasiukov (wikipedia.org); Soviet Championships: 'He qualified for the finals a total of eleven times.'

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For the past few weeks I've been running a series to learn more about Fabiano Caruana's early career. Here is a summary of the posts.

• 2018-04-17: Caruana's TWIC Debut
• 2018-04-24: Caruana's Rise to GM (*)
• 2018-05-08: Caruana at Corus (*)
• 2018-05-15: Caruana at the World Cup

Although I didn't plan it at the time, the four posts document a natural progression in the early career of any budding chess superstar: early steps, Grandmaster title, GM supertournaments, World Championship aspirations. If I had been more alert while putting together 'early steps', I would have included Caruana's experience in youth tournaments.

I might come back to Caruana's career for the 2018 Carlsen - Caruana title match later this year in London. In the meantime, here are a number of related posts on this blog -- most of them recent -- about GM Caruana.

• 2017-08-03: Fabulous Fabiano (*)
• 2018-01-29: Interview Videos : Caruana
• 2018-03-16: Game and Mistake of the Day; 'Kramnik - Caruana / Candidates 2018 / Round 4'
• 2018-03-29: March Yahoos; 'Fabiano Caruana Wins The Candidates Tournament'
• 2018-03-30: Berlin Candidates - Final Press Conference
• 2018-04-12: Carlsen's Next Challenger
• 2018-04-13: Interview Videos : Carlsen's Next Challenger
• 2018-04-26: April Yahoos; '[Caruana's] evolution makes a good case study for homeschooling and other ways of learning'
• 2018-05-13: Fabiano Streams on Twitch

Posts marked '(*)' are currently showing up in 'Popular Posts (Last 12 months)' at the bottom of all blog pages. This attests to Caruana's popularity.