Ivanchuk and A. Muzychuk Win King's Tournament Events in Rapid & Blitz
Stories, games, and videos here.
Stories, games, and videos here.
There are plenty of things wrong with the 2017 Women's World Championship:
1. It should be a Women's World Cup, like the "men's"/open event, not a championship. (Naturally, if you think the open World Cup should be the World Championship, then you'll find this a feature instead of a bug.)
2. It absolutely should not be held in Iran for geopolitical reasons.
3. It should not be held in Iran because of the hijab. If it were merely a matter of respectful or professional attire, like men in certain occupations having to wear a suit and tie, that would be one thing, but this goes well beyond that. Note: My point here is that FIDE has no business forcing non-Muslim women (or even Muslim women who disagree with Iran's interpretation of what women must wear) to comply with a country's distinctive religious dictates as a precondition for playing in an event they have qualified for on their merits as chess players.
4. Top players like Hou Yifan and Humpy Koneru aren't playing, and from the U.S. Irina Krush and Nazi Paikidze are sitting it out as well. Whoever's "fault" it is doesn't matter; it still detracts from the intrinsic interest of the event.
But the show goes on, and the finalists are Anna Muzychuk of Ukraine and Zhongyi Tan of China. It has been a great few months for Muzychuk, who recently won the women's world championships in both rapid and blitz, and who has made it to the final, ironically enough, without needing to play a single tiebreaker. Zhongyi, by contrast, has had lots of tiebreaks, twice scraping through an Armageddon game.
And did so on tiebreaks over Magnus Carlsen, too! As in the 2015 championship both players were dominant on day 1, but this time both players stayed hot to the very end, and their huge score of 16.5/21 left them two points ahead of their closest pursuers: Daniil Dubov (bronze medalist on tiebreaks), Hikaru Nakamura, and 2015 world blitz champion Alexander Grischuk.
It's noteworthy that Karjakin won their head-to-head game, and it's also interesting that Vassily Ivanchuk defeated Carlsen yet again, though he finished out of the running for medals and couldn't back up his earlier win in the rapid championship.
There's a nice report on day two of the event here, and I'll close with a couple (or maybe four) bits of information: Anna Muzychuk won both the rapid and the blitz events in the concurrent ladies' event(s), and the 2017 World Rapid and Blitz titles are to be contested in July, in Munich, Germany.