Final Four in the Women's World Championship (Plus Some News); All Draws in the Russian Championship
With the notable exception of Malakhov-Nepomniachtchi, which went 108 moves, round 5 of the Russian Championship was a fairly easygoing affair. All the games were drawn, so Karjakin and Svidler continue to lead; their 3.5 points keeps them half a point ahead of Grischuk and Nepomniachtchi.
There wasn't so much action in the Women's World Championship today, as only one of the quarterfinal matches required a tiebreak. The result was Ruan Lufei's defeat of Harika Dronavalli, and in the semi-finals we have the following pairings: Hou Yifan-Humpy Koneru and Ruan Lufei-Zhao Xue. The first pairing is rather unfortunate, as it pits the top two seeds in the semi-finals. This is the result of the decision to make the defending (and now outgoing) champion Alexandra Kosteniuk the top seed in spite of her rating. It might be flattering to Kosteniuk, but the likeliest result in the real world is that one of the two best players will lose some prestige and a lot of money by being eliminated one round sooner than necessary.
Returning to a topic discussed in earlier rounds, regular commenter Thomas passes along info from mishanp about the non-participation of Nadezhda Kosintseva. He (Thomas) writes:
- She missed both qualifying events, one due to her university studies, one because of illness. Apparently this year's European championship - which I had mentioned in the comments - is a qualifier for the next WCh in 2012 !!??
- She then asked for a wildcard (IMO logical given several special circumstances) but the organizing country Turkey insisted on two wildcards - one is normal - and got both. Yaznici is a close buddy of Ilyumzhinov and supported his FIDE presidential campaign ... .
This info, based on Russian sources, is from "mishanp" (owner of the Chessintranslation site and regularly commenting on Dailydirt).
Thank you, Thomas!
Reader Comments (1)
You're welcome Dennis! For clarity I should maybe stress that two things weren't part of mishanp's post at Dailydirt:
- the parenthetical "IMO ..."
- the reference to Yaznici being a friend of Ilyumzhinov, implicitly suggesting that this meant two wildcards for Turkey.
Actually, based on his Internet track record, I think mishanp agrees with me in both cases, but I can't be sure.