Arctic Sketches

Once finally back home in Salekhard, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia, in a press conference of her own on Monday, Vice Women’s World Chess Champion Aleksandra Yuryevna Goryachkina again shared her impressions on her World Championship odyssey. “It was an invaluable experience, and yet not an ordinary one, with lots of excitement and little time to recover. It was interesting, hard and exciting. All games were tough, although each was different from the others. I suffered two defeats in a row: the ninth and tenth games. The ninth one was the most tense game of the match and also my negative turning point, because before then I was in the lead, but here there were terrible swings — a crazy mess! It could have ended with any result, but I was not lucky. And immediately, the next day, in the tenth game, I wasn’t able to recover from that. I controlled the situation until a certain point, but then... I’ve lost the thread and the game”, Goryachkina said. On the eve of the last classical game she distracted herself by watching a hockey match at the ice sports palace, but the “Karpovian” exorcism didn’t work. Eventually a tie-breaker was needed to crown a queen. “The tie-breaker is a lottery. Much depends on luck, and fortune ultimately favoured 居文君 (Jū Wénjūn)”, Goryachkina added. Unfortunately she will not be participating in the forthcoming 2nd edition of the Cairns Cup, being instead engaged in preparing for the 44th Chess Olympiad and the 3rd stage of the Women’s Grand Prix 2019–2020. Photo: Denis Rybakov/Krasnyy Sever.