Always Interesting Aronian

For this month's featured video, I had a choice of good clips about AlphaZero, last seen on this blog in 'Game Changer' Excerpts. I went instead with one of the many interesting interviews made available during the 2019 Gibraltar Chess Festival, aka GibChess.

The Beauty of Chess: A Levon Aronian Interview (23:50) • 'Published on Jan 24, 2019'

The description said only,

Tania Sachdev talks to Armenian chess Grandmaster Levon Aronian about his life in chess.

About two minutes into the clip, the following exchange takes place:-

Q: There has been a shift in the chess calendar of the really elite players in the world. There was a time when this was a very decided calendar. You played amongst each other in these closed events. We see more and more elite players participating in open events like Gibraltar. What do you think is the reason for that?

A: The elite players are tired of playing against each other. We want some excitement. We want to face other players. We want to see what it feels like to play sompe riskier openings, to try to win more with Black. That's why the elite players like to play in open tournaments. We normally get accused of 'They all play against each other', but that's not our design. We like to be open and that's why tournaments like Gibraltar and Isle of Man are something that we look forward to.

Other topics are:-

How to prepare for opens? How to decide what tournaments to play? How important is the World Championship? The Candidates tournament? What about Magnus Carlsen? The change at the top in FIDE? Chess in Armenia? [More++]

GM Aronian did not succeed in repeating his victory at 2018 Gibraltar. He finished 6.5-3.5, two points behind the winner GM Artemiev. For more videos from the same channel see GibChess - YouTube.