Usually when every year ends everybody makes some post with the best moments of the last year. So I decide it to post my most favourites shots of 2011.

The most favourite male portrait is Nikolaidis Ioannis‘ portrait

And the most favourite female portrait is Valentina Golubenko’s portrait

Antonis Pavlidis is the new Greek Chess Champion. Antonis is one of the most talented young greek players. He is only 18 years old but he already won his first Greek championship. He was the winner of the qualifying Greek chess championship in Kavala 2011 (from there is the photos) and finally finished managed to accomplish this good start with 6.5/9 in Greek chess championship in Chania over Nikos Galopoulos and GM Ioannis Nikolaidis. Antonis is already International master but I think soon he will become and Grandmaster

Last years Turkey in chess made in great progress. With Ali Nihat Yazici as president of Turkish chess federation, to make and some difficult decisions for the trainers of national teams finally in this European Team Championship had a good performance with a very young team. In their first board was Yilmaz Mustafa that he is only 19 years old.

And the older player of the team was 21! But for this progress Efstartios Grivas (their coach and captain) told me that they work very hard! So congratulation to Ali, to Stratos for being their trainer and of course to all the team members.

In chess world one of the most popular people is Anastasia Karlovich. She is not only a woman Grand Master but also almost in all tournaments the official chess photographer.

Last year she took a photo of me that more than 11 months was my profile picture. This year I was waiting the new one and finally she took me when I was looking for my next target to make a photo. So this year also I tried to have some pictures of her too.

So this post is for one of the best and prettiest chess photographers Anastastasia Kalovich

Michael Adams won the Golden medal in the first board in European Team Chess Championship. Maybe England didn’t succeed alot but he managed to have the second greater performance of all the tournament and the best score in the 1st board.

In the last round Gustafsson Jan and Sargissian Gabriel played until the end to draw their game. When all other games had finished their position was a draw. But Sargissian Gabriel couldn’t agree to a draw. If he drew, Armenia maybe was losing the bronze medal and surely the silver medal.  So he fought until the end. I don’t know if he made some mistakes in the endgame that made him to draw but finally was a little bit upset because of this and didn’t want to stand next to Jan Gustafsson when medals for boards were awarded. The official didn’t understand that so he tried to take them closer and it was a little bit funny that Jan Gustafsson that is really tall had no problem but Gabriel Sargissian got more upset about this…

Germany won the trophy of European Team chess championship, and it was a big surprise for most of us. Germany was an outsider as was and Greece in Euro 2004 (soccer). Arkadij Naiditsch, Georg Meier, Daniel Fridman, Jan Gustafsson, and Rainer Buhmann took proudly their golden medals and trophy. 

In women section, european cup took it Russian team. Nadezhda Kosintseva, Tatiana Kosintseva, Valentina Gunina, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Natalia Pogonina and Yuri Dokhian as captain. On the photo is one of the rare times that the former trainer of Kasparov Yuri Dokhian is smiling. 

Greek chess team in European chess team championship had some very good moments, winning England but finally finished at 20th position. On this photo we see that before the games Greek national team trainer, Vasilis Kotronias encourages players before the game. The smiles on their faces show that at least they enjoyed it.

Teimour Radjabov on the first board of Azerbaijan in European Team Chess club maybe didn’t made a great tournament but he gave a great victory to his team by winning Peter Svidler and this way the finally took silver medal.