World Cup 2011: Round 3 Tiebreaks
Friday, September 2, 2011 at 10:25PM
Dennis Monokroussos in World Cup 2011

Most of the key favorites made it through - Karjakin defeated So, Mamedyarov beat Fridman, Ponomariov beat Ni Hua (with difficulty), Grischuk beat Feller and Svidler beat Nguyen. That doesn't mean that all the favorites, or even all the 2700s, made it through. After Vallejo bounced back from his horrible loss in the first game to beat Bruzon with Black in the rematch, I think most commentators expected Vallejo to finish the job in the tiebreaks. Instead, Bruzon proved his resilience and bounced the 13th seed out of the tournament.

Another upset was Vachier-Lagrave's loss to Bu Xiangzhi, and perhaps the shocker of the event so far was Michael Adams' loss to Peter Heine Nielsen. Adams' rating isn't quite what it was a few years ago, but he has had a good year and he has been incredibly successful in these big knockout events in the past.

There were other results too, but I'll just note here that the one American involved in tiebreaks today lost - Alexander Ivanov went down to Igor Lysyj.

Now that there are "only" 32 players left, I'll give the full pairings for round 3. (Two notes. First, the higher-rated player is listed first; second, it's organized to let you predict future pairings as well - the winner of the first match in each pair plays the winner of the second; the winner of the first quartet plays the winners of the second, and so on.)

Karjakin - Polgar
Dominguez - Lysyj

Kamsky - Nepomniachtchi
Svidler - Caruana

Ponomariov - Efimenko
Le Quang Liem - Bruzon

Gashimov - Tomashevsky
Nielsen - Parligras

Ivanchuk - Sutovsky
Bu Xiangzhi - Gupta

Radjabov - Bacrot
Jakovenko - Jobava

Mamedyarov - Zherebukh
Navara - Moiseenko

Grischuk - Morozevich (definitely premature!)
Vitiugov - Potkin

Links: Event website (with excellent video coverage) here, TWIC round summary here, Wikipedia brackets here.

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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