negotiations with prominent women chess players to invite them to this round robintournament.Is it OK if someone calls you “the father of chess” in Azerbaijan?I do not object. It is pleasant to hear that.Do you think that you had any role in Garry Kasparov’s chess career?Yes, I think so. Kasparov was playing in a blitz tournament in Baku when he wasnine years old, that is to say in 1972. The tournament was devoted to 1 May ofInternational Workers’ Day, and there was no age limit. So you can imagine howdifficult the tournament was. He was very successful and reached the final. Iwrote an article about him in the Sovetskiy Sport newspaper after the tournament.A German newspaper quoted my article later. This was the first media materialabout Kasparov abroad at the time. Later on, when Kasparov became the Champion ofthe Soviet Union in 1975 in Tbilisi, the Palace of Pioneers of Baku published abook which also included some information about him. Kasparov came to me and gavea copy of the book with his signature: “Moemu pervomu otkryvatelyu” ("To my firstdiscoverer"). But I should also add that I have never been his trainer.What are the main differences between the 1970s and today in terms of developmentof chess in our country?In general, I would say that today is better. However, there were certain positivethings at that time. The primary positive difference was that there was a strongbacking of chess by the Soviet government. There was no problem in terms offunding. Chess schools had everything, and they could invite professionals toteach chess there. The bad point was that we had problems to discover the truestrength of our players, i.e. the government used to send a limited number ofplayers from 15 republics to international tournaments. We could not discover thetrue strength of players who held second or third places because we could sendabroad only those players who occupied the first place in various tournaments athome. In 1996, we sent Teimour Radjabov, Vugar Gashimov and Gadir Guseinov to theworld junior chess championship in Slovakia, where they held the first threeplaces. You can imagine that this would never happen if we were part of the SovietUnion. Today we have more grandmasters and the popularity of chess is growing fromday to day in the country.How about the methodology of teaching chess at schools? Do we still keep thetraditions of the Soviet chess school?The methodology is changing, as computers become a very important part of trainingfor chess players. The role of trainers is diminishing as chess players can findanswers to their questions by consulting computer programs. However, there isstill great need in trainers, especially in the early stage of training. Computerscannot lead players to the right direction when they start learning, trainers can.It is true that computers speed up training process but chess players should workhard themselves at the chessboard before they resort to the help of computers.Faik Gasanov showing me some secrets of the Ruy LopezThere is a tale that after seeing a rifle, our folklore hero, Koroglu, says: “Trueheroism has gone”. Do you agree with the notion that chess heroism has gone aftercomputers emerged. In other words, do you think that Kasparov would have become agrandmaster at a younger age than Karjakin or Carlsen if he used computers then?
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