World Cup 2011: Round 2, Day 2
Today was an especially good day for Etienne Bacrot, Francisco Vallejo Pons, and Ruben Felgaer as they each bounced back from losses on day 1 of the second round (to Anton Filippov, Lazaro Bruzon Batista, and Yaroslav Zherebukh respectively) 2 to win today and force tiebreaks. For Vallejo it must have been especially sweet, given his spectacular collapse in the first game. (Ironically, in this game too he wound up a pawn in a rook and knight ending, but this time the normal result came to pass.)
All of the other day 1 winners maintained or increased their lead. There were two 2-0 winners: Alexander Morozevich (over Alexandr Fier) and, most notably, Vladimir Potkin, who won again over Alexei Shirov. As for day 2 winners not already mentioned, that group consists of Gata Kamsky (over Rustam Kasimdzhanov - good news for U.S. fans), David Navara (over Alexander Onischuk - bad news for U.S. fans), Abhijeet Gupta (over Sam Shankland - still more bad news for the U.S. contingent), Baadur Jobava (over Radoslaw Wojtaszek - more bad news for Anand's seconds [see Kamsky-Kasimdzhanov, above]), Fabiano Caruana ([send him back!] over Yuri Drozdovskij), Zahar Efimenko (over Ferenc Berkes) and last but not least, Judit Polgar over Sergei Movsesian.
Here are the tiebreak matches we'll get to enjoy tomorrow (the higher-rated player is listed first):
- Karjakin - So
- Mamedyarov - Fridman
- Grischuk - Feller
- Ponomariov - Ni Hua
- Svidler - Nguyen
- Vallejo - Bruzon
- Vachier-Lagrave - Bu Xiangzhi
- Lysyj - Ivanov
- Moiseenko - Inarkiev
- Adams - Nielsen
- Nepomniachtchi - Riazantsev
- Bacrot - Filippov
- Zherebukh - Felgaer
After tomorrow, we'll be down to the final 32.
Links: Official site (with excellent live video coverage, still available in scrollable replay) here; Wikipedia brackets here. No annotated games from me today, but among the interesting action I'd commend readers to have a look at the entertaining Shirov-Potkin game and the nice finishing attack by Polgar against Movsesian.
Reader Comments (1)
Actually Grischuk will play you-know-who tomorrow. Unfortunate mistyping or deliberate filtering, Dennis? Let's hope you will not have to bother about this tomorrow evening ;)
[DM: I think my policy of avoiding mentioning you-know-who's name was so effective that it even worked on me! The omission has been repaired.]