In round 4 of the European Club Cup the top teams - teams at least half-composed of 2700+ players - started to face off. The two absolute top teams, SOCAR and Siberia, both won their matches, and will face each other in round 5. SOCAR (Topalov, Caruana, etc.) defeated a mighty opponent, Obiettivo Risarcimento Padova with an undefeated 4-2 score, as Veselin Topalov defeated Peter Leko on board 1 while Shakhriyar Mamedyarov bested Etienne Bacrot with Black on board 5. As for Siberia (Kramnik, Aronian, Grischuk, etc.) it was an even more convincing 4.5-1.5 win against Mednyi Vsadnik. Vladimir Kramnik beat Peter Svidler with Black (maybe keeping his slim chances of becoming a rating qualifier for the Candidates' alive) on board 1 while a pair of Chinese stars on boards 4 and 5, Li Chao and Wang Yue, defeated Maxims Matlakov and Rodshtein, respectively. Now the big, exciting question is whether both teams' board 1 will play. If so, that means a Kramnik-Topalov showdown: no handshakes and sparks will fly.
Also 4-0 in team matches is Alkaloid (Ivanchuk, Tomashevsky, etc.). It only won game against AVE Novy Bor, but that was all they needed. Again it was a Chinese player coming through: Yu Yangyi defeating Zbynek Hracek on board 6(!).
On the slightly lower boards, one result was shocking. University-Belorechensk lost to Vaalerenga, despite outrating them on every board by a minimum of 168 points (on board 1) and a maximum of 339 points (on board 6). Staggering. Aleksej Alexandrov (2600) managed to defeat FM Brede Kvisvik (2318) on board 5, but Sergey Rublevsky (2702) lost to IM Johan-Sebastian Christiansen (2391) on board 3 while Konstantin Landa (2626) lost to IM Magne Sagafos (2398) on board 4. (You'll notice that board order isn't rating order. This isn't permitted in U.S. team events and it probably seems pretty odd to most of us on my side of the pond, but I doubt that the Europeans care very much about this. If I recall correctly, Bundesliga teams can be out of rating order as well.)