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European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
December 17, 2015
The European Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship 2015 will take place in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
The Blitz event is scheduled for December 18. The strong field of 679 participants is led by GM Stanislav Bogdanovich (UKR 2815), defending champion GM David Navara (CZE 2806), GM Rauf Mamedov (AZE 2777), etc.
The tournament continues with the Rapid Championship, which is scheduled for the 19th and 20th December, starting from 10 am. An amazing number of 800 players will try their luck in the Rapid event, and the best chances are with the top seeds GM Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (AZE 2784), GM Dmitry Andreikin (RUS 2773), GM Ernesto Inarkiev (RUS 2742), GM Sergey Movsesian (ARM 2724), GM Jobava Baadur (GEO 2727), etc.
Both Championships will be played according to the Swiss System in 11 rounds. Time control for the Blitz event will be 3 minutes + 2 seconds, and 15 minutes + 10 seconds for the Rapid tournament.
_______
Nigel Short is seeded 11th in the rapids and says that he will go if he can get there without a visa!
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Blitz
December 18, 2015
The tournament is in full swing. Nigel Short made it to Minsk. Two of his tweets:
(Dec. 16) – Off to sunny Minsk. Back in the USSR.
(Dec. 18) - Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has been here in Minsk. If anyone imagines Makropoulos taking over is anything other than a ruse, they are mistaken.
Nigel said he wanted to get in without a visa. One person thought that this was because Nigel has been to dozens of countries in his career and for the visa application in Khanty-Mansiysk in 2010, they asked you to list what countries you have been to in the last ten years.
At the Edmonton International in 2012, which Nigel participated in, there was a question for ChessBase readers on the number of countries.
Counting the number of different countries in which Nigel Short had won tournaments (first, equal first, and including weekends, but not matches) was not so easy to determine: with Nigel's help we counted 29 countries: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Estonia, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, Peru, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Ukraine, USA, Venezuela. Gibraltar was not included as a separate country.
(Add Belarus to the above)
_________
Evgenij Miroshnichenko is the commentator in English at the official site. We saw him at Khanty-Mansiysk Grand Prix 2015. He does a very good job commentating on games from oblique camera shots rather than on the electronic boards.
The venue is the Palace of Sports. The playing room has five boards per table and there are carpets on the floor.
For Jeopardy! geography fans, Minsk is on the Svislach and Nyamiha rivers.
The blitz tournament is an 11 double-round Swiss with 3 minutes and 2 seconds per game.
I cannot really understand all the byes etc that give the players an unequal number of games. Jobava finished with 15 and Short with 9.
It was interesting to see Yuri Balashov’s name among the participants. He was a very strong player in the ‘70s and in 1992 was Boris Spassky’s second in Yugoslavia’s Revenge Match of the Century vs Bobby Fischer. He scored 14.5.
All the games are not immediately available, so I cannot tell you how many times Jobava played 1.b3, if at all.
________
A final note
There is the old Jewish story of the Russian itinerant who needed to travel from Minsk to Pinsk. He caught a ride with a wagon driver whose cart was drawn by a rather ancient horse.
As they approached the first significant hill on the Minsk-Pinsk highway, the driver halted the cart, unhitched the horse, and asked the passenger to assist him in pushing the wagon to the top of the hill. At the top, he hitched up the horse again, and they proceeded on their way until the next small elevation, where they again repeated the previous procedure.
After the fifth such ritual, the now-exhausted passenger dropped to his knees at the side of the road and looked quizzically at the driver. “I know why I have to get to Pinsk. I suspect you have a reason for going there as well. Enlighten me please. Why are we bringing the horse?”
With google maps in front of me it was more than flesh and blood could do not to find the distance between Minsk and Pinsk. It is 305 km.
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
Rauf Mamedov picked up 40.8 ELO for his effort today and now has a live blitz rating of 2809.8, which makes him the #9 rated blitz player in the world. Rauf is clearly a far superior blitz player since his classic rating of 2650 isn't quite good enough to even crack the top 100. All the other top 10 blitz players have a classic rating of at least 2707 (Nepo) and most (7) > 2750 so Rauf is very much an anomaly.
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Blitz
December 18, 2015
Nigel Short seemed to drop out of the blitz tournament half-way through. Some speculated that he was saving himself for the two days of rapids. That makes sense in that there were 22 games per person today.
- He has had some health problems recently pulling out of the British Knockout at the Classic. Fingers crossed he's just being a bit cautious.
_______
I finally got a file of games from the blitz. Several scores were missing but three that Nigel played impressed me because I had never heard of the openings before. What do you make of these?
There was a Yuri Vovk who stood ninth in the World Blitz in Berlin 2015. His blitz rating is 380 Elo points higher than Orest’s. Both are from Ukraine.
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
The Brazilian (Gunderam) Defence that Nigel Short lost to has scored rather well at chessgames.com. There's been 47 games there that began 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Qe7 3.Nc3 and Black is +20, -19, =8. And Taras Fomin was spotting Nigel some serious ELO since the 38-year-old Russian is only rated 2312/2278/2355.
Richard Rapport played 3.Qe2 against a Caro-Kann at the Politiken Cup (2014) and managed to checkmate his opponent in just 5 moves (:
I have played this opening as Black a couple of times in the 80s, though I didn't know its name. I remember seeing it in a Nimzowitsch Defense book I own. IM Doug Root from the US played it fairly regularly back in the day. I think the way Short played is now thought quite a bit better for White.
"Tom is a well known racist, and like most of them he won't admit it, possibly even to himself." - Ed Seedhouse, October 4, 2020.
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Rapid 2015, Minsk
December 19, 2015
The first day of rapid had 7 rounds and tomorrow there will be 4.
The standing of the first 15 players is:
1. Jobava, Baadur GEO 7
2. Petrosian, Tigran ARM 7
3. Short, Nigel ENG 6.5
4. Navara, David CZE 6
5. Guseinov, Gadir AZE 6
6. Melkumyan, Hrant ARM 6
7. Harutjunyan, Gevorg ARM 6
8. Bocharov, Dmitry RUS 6
9. Razin, Vadim UKR 6
10. Ragger, Markus AUT 6
11. Smirin, Ilia ISR 6
12. Zhigalko, Sergei BOR 6
13. Chigaev, Maksim RUS 6
14. Popov, Ivan RUS 6
15. Mikhalevski, Victor ISR 6
and ten others with 6 points
Some of the games:
European Rapid 2015, Minsk
Round 2, Dec. 19, 2015
Navara, David (2730) – Harshkou, Mikita (2300)
C06 French, Tarrasch, Closed Variation, Main Line
Earlier in the thread I told the story of a journey from Minsk to Pinsk.
I should tell you that there is a book of recreational math puzzles entitled The Chicken from Minsk. It is by Yuri Cherniyak, former Associate Professor of Physics at Moscow State University.
The chicken problem gives you an idea of the difficulty and fun of these puzzles.
A fiber-optic cable completely encircles the Earth, by chance running through a new, privately owned chicken farm on the outskirts of Minsk. The chickens refuse to walk or fly over the cable and will only pass under it. Clearly, the cable must be raised off the ground by 1 foot if the chickens are to survive.
For technical and bureaucratic reasons, the cable must then be raised 1 foot higher everywhere, around the entire circumference of the Earth (the cable is thick and fragile and cannot be bent or twisted, even slightly). The farmer exercising his newly won individual rights, refuses to permit this cable to cross his land unless it is raised.
The bureaucrat in charge of the project is a holdover from the old days. He maliciously agrees to raise the cable only if the farm agrees to pay for all the additional cable, at the rate of $1 (U.S.) per foot. The farmer agrees, provided that the government will pay for the additional supporting structures. How much will the chicken farmer pay?
Re: European Rapid and Blitz Championships 2015, Minsk
European Rapid Chess Championship 2015
December 20, 2-15
Day Two
The last four rounds of the Rapid were played today.
The summary from Chessdom.com:
Ivan Popov became the winner of the European Rapid Chess Championship 2015, which was held on 19-20th December in Minsk, Belarus. Popov defeated Ilia Smirin from Israel in the direct encounter of the last round and triumphed with 10 points out of 11 games. The silver medal went to Armenian Grandmaster Hrant Melkumyan (2011 European Blitz Champion), who came sole second with 9.5 points, by defeating Nigel Short in the final round. Bronze went to the untitled Ukrainian Vadim Rasin who is probably the biggest surprise in the tournament. He defeated Ernesto Inarkiev with Black in the last round and took the medal thanks to the best tie-break in the group with 9 points.
The best ranked female players were Olga Girya, Anastasia Bodnaruk and Nina Sirotkina who scored 8 points and shared 27th place.
Note: If you do the calculation, you will find that the farmer in The Chicken from Minsk pays only $6. The circumference of the Earth is given by the formula 2πR, where R is the radius. If you increase the radius by 1 foot, the increase in the circumference will be 2π feet, i.e. 6.28.
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