European Championship Update: Efimenko, Jobava Lead
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 10:05PM Zahar Efimenko and Baadur Jobava share first with 5.5 after 6 of 11 rounds at the European Championships in Rijeka, Croatia. They drew each other in round 5, and have otherwise disposed of their very strong opposition so far. (Strong enough that both players enjoy 2990+ TPRs thus far.)
Half a point back are Ian Nepomniachtchi, Alexander Riazantsev, Rauf Mamedov, Zoltan Almasi and Bojan Vuckovic, and then another 28 players have 4.5 points. With five rounds to go it's far from over, but on the other hand this event is a World Cup qualifier (the top 22 here qualify for that event), so with two or three rounds to go the peleton is likely to coast in with a bunch of draws.
For now, though, there's lots of action, and I noticed a number of very nice games the last couple of days. They're presented here without annotations, but you'll likely enjoy them all the same. Have a look, here.
Reader Comments (3)
Dennis,
Are you sure this is a World Cup qualifier? I thought the next World Cup was in 2011, so wouldn't the 2011 European Championship be the quailifying event, not this one (2010)?
Jeffrey,
I was trusting an earlier comment by Thomas on this - but perhaps mistakenly.
At least for the previous World Cup, both preceding European championships (2008 and 2009) were qualifying events. In total, 46 European players qualify via the continental championships (note plural).
As far as I remember, in 2009 one or two players didn't play tiebreak matches for World Cup matches because they had already qualified the year before.