Pavel Eljanov Wins Politiken Cup

Submitted by SonofPearl on Tue, 08/10/2010 at 10:36am.

The Politiken Cup was a 10-round Swiss Open held in Copenhagen, Denmark from 31 July - 8 August.

In a similar fashion to the recent British Championships, one player was rated around 150 Elo points above the rest of the field and dominated to win the event.

Current world #8 ranked player Pavel Eljanov (pictured) scored 8.5/10 to live up to his top billing. 27-year old Eljanov is in great form, having won the last FIDE Grand Prix in Astrakhan, and is a clearly player to watch!

The top of the standings looked like this:

1	Eljanov, Pavel	UKR	2755	8.5
2	Rodshtein, Maxim	ISR	2609	8.0
3	Landa, Konstantin	RUS	2598	8.0
4	Macieja, Bartlomiej	POL	2639	8.0
5	Meier, Georg	GER	2648	7.5
6	Danielsen, Henrik	ISL	2512	7.5
7	Hector, Jonny	SWE	2584	7.5
8	Rasmussen, Allan Stig	DEN	2510	7.5
9	Ganguly, Surya Shekhar	IND	2655	7.5
10	Mchedlishvili, Mikheil	GEO	2625	7.5
11	Hansen, Sune Berg	DEN	2595	7.5
12	Portisch, Lajos	HUN	2539	7.5
13	Baklan, Vladimir	UKR	2638	7.5
14	Cmilyte, Viktoria	LIT	2527	7.5
15	Brynell, Stellan	SWE	2495	7.5
16	Kovchan, Alexander	UKR	2571	7.5

In a side event in honour of the legendary 75-year old Danish GM, Bent Larsen, the current Danish #1, Peter Heine Nielsen took on the ever-popular Russian GM, Peter Svidler. The unusual challenge featured a 6-game rapid match, a 10-game blitz match and a 10-game Larsen Opening themed blitz match.

Peter Svidler was a convincing winner overall, taking the rapid match 4.5-1.5, winning the themed blitz 7-3, and drawing the blitz 5-5.

Unusually, many of the games of the match were filmed and are available to watch on YouTube. An example is below.