Saturday
Dec112010
Other Events: Women's World Championship, Russian Championship
Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 6:37PM
Round 3 of the Women's World Championship is finished - except for those matches going into tiebreaks tomorrow. Koneru, Zhao Xue, Lahno and Ju Wenjun all advanced, in each case by a 1.5-.5 score built on winning the first game and drawing today. (Their victims, respectively, were Zatonskih [no more Americans in the competition], Dembo, Huang Qian and Anna Muzychuk.)
Meanwhile, the (very strong) Russian Championship got underway. Seven of the 12 players are rated over 2700, but only one - Ian Nepomniachtchi - won today. (The other five games were drawn.) The other 2700s are Grischuk, Karjakin, Jakovenko, Svidler, Vitiugov and Malakhov.
Reader Comments (2)
Why did Zatonskih take a 14 move draw in a must win?!
[DM: Beats me - I was thinking the same thing! If you lose, you lose - what can you save the rating points for if not the world championship? Maybe (I'm hoping) the game really went longer, and it was just some sort of transmission error with the DGT board.]
The official site's round 3.2 report says that the game did end after 14 moves, saying White could win a pawn. Indeed, Black's game looks pretty putrid after White triples on the e-file and plays Ba3. Black can't even play ...g4 and take on d4. IMHO, Zatonskih allowed White too free a rein with 10.e4 fxe4.