The Daily Update: Mainz, Day 1 (and More)
Lots of events are underway, and many of them are in crunch time as they'll end tomorrow.
(1) Mainz. This event has some superstars, and after five of eleven rounds in this rapid competition there's a 12-way tie for first. The following players are 5-0 (this is given in tiebreak order, not rating order): Kempinski, Bareev, Gustafsson, Markowski, Grischuk, Karjakin, Gashimov, Bologan, Inarkiev, Aronian, Kamsky and Kasimdzhanov. You could have a fantastic round-robin tournament with those players alone! A further 10 players are just half a point back, including Shirov and former superstar Ulf Andersson.
(2) Politiken Cup. There's one round to go, but the field hasn't stratified very much. After nine rounds, five players lead with 7.5, six more players have 7 and at least 15 more have 6.5. The leaders are Eljanov, Landa, Rodshtein, Macieja and Ganguly. Hungarian legend Lajos Portisch (eight times a Candidate, for starters) is among the 7-pointers - not bad for a 73-year old!
(3) Arctic Circle Challenge. After eight of nine rounds, there are two leaders: Loek van Wely and Manuel Leon Hoyos, both with 7 points. Three players are half a point back, including Bartosz Socko. He had been leading almost all the way, but lost in round 8 to Leon Hoyos.
(4) U.S. Open. All the sections have finally merged, and going into tonight's penultimate round Alejandro Ramirez and Alex Shabalov lead with 6.5/7, half a point ahead of 10 others and a full point ahead of 18 more.
(5) Other events are going on too, but as they continue past the weekend I'll turn to them later. One major event starting late this upcoming week is the NH Chess Tournament in Amsterdam, a double-round Scheveningen team tournament between the "Rising Stars" and "Experience" squads. The biggest prize in all of this is for the top scorer on the Rising Stars team, as he'll win automatic entry to next year's Amber rapid & blindfold tournament. Here are the lineups:
Experience: Gelfand, Svidler, PH Nielsen, van Wely, Ljubojevic.
Rising Stars: Nakamura, Caruana, So, Giri and Howell.
Reader Comments (2)
Rising star only wins the Amber spot PROVIDED they finish with a plus score. It almost didn't happen last year as smeets went into the last round with +1 and the only person on a plus score... had he lost then no one would have made it to Amber.
Kamsky wins Mainz!
Great year for Gata, first US Championship, now Rapid World Championship.