The Ukraine Team Championship is traditionally played in Alushta, on the Crimean Peninsula. in the middle of spring. For this championship, 14 teams competed for nine rounds.

Unfortunately, not all the important Ukrainian chess centers were represented. As usual, this is caused by the general problem of getting sponsors for sports teams in the Ukraine. The absence of Ukrainian number one Vassily Ivanchuk is in the same tradition.

The main surprise was the second-place finish of the team that reigned from 1994 to 1999, DANKO-DONBASS (till 1998 this team was referred to as DONBASS Alchevsk).

The considerably less prestigious team JURIDICAL ACADEMY, from Kharkov, managed to collect the same number of points, and because it beat DANKO-DONBASS in its match, by a score of 3½-2½, it was awarded first place in the competition.

Another unexpected result was the team joined by the strongest player under 20 in the world, Ruslan Ponamariov (2627), who won 7 points out of 8 playing on first board for a modest team of the new A.V. Momot Regional Donetsk Chess Club, which took third place because of his excellent result.

Certainly, the loss of Ponomariov, who had played for DANKO-DONBASS in the past, appears to have been a miscalculation of its leaders, who were probably confident of victory because of its many strong GMs. Nevertheless, this miscalculation will help Ukranian chess, since the pepetual domination of the team championships by one team, however brilliant, bored the chess public.

You can bet that DANKO, the heavyweight champion sponsor in Ukrainian chess, will try hard to recruit Ponomariov back to its team.

/ by Mikhail Golubev for www.kasparovchess.com /

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There were 14 teams competing in the Ukrainian club championship, which was held in Alushta. No team from Lviv arrived due to financial problems, but three players from Lviv successfully performed in the championship. Head of Grandmasters' Schoold Olga Belyaeva (Kyiv) invited Kateryna Lahno (U10 World Champion from 1999, U12 Ukrainian Champion from 2000), IM Andriy Volokytin (U14 World Championship bronze medallist from 1999), Nazar Firman (Master of Sports of Ukraine, Champion of Lviv Chess Club 1999, U18 Ukrainian Champion from 2000) to play for Mriya team, which eventually got 5th place. Andrei Volokitin played especially well. He scored 6 points out of 9 possible and shared best result on board 2 with World U14 Champion from 1999 Zahar Efimenko (Uzhgorod). One of his wins was over Alexander Zubarev, the winner of the zonal tournament, and a draw vs GM Timoshenko. Successful performance of Lviv players to some extent caused that rich and super-strong club "Danko-Donbass" (with seven GMs), that regularly plays in the European Club Cup, did not win. The title of Champion of Ukraine in 2000 went to the Law Academy Kharkiv.

/ by Taras Mykhalus /