80th Ukrainian Chess Championship
The 80th Ukrainian Chess Championships take place from 10-21 June in Kiev.
It's not unusual for some national chess championships to fail to attract their best countrymen and effectively become second tier events. However, this year the Ukrainian championships has a line-up which includes almost all of the best players that this great chess country has to offer.
Only Vassily Ivanchuk is absent, having a prior commitment to attend the Bazna Kings tournament in Romania which will start on Saturday (preview here soon!).
The top seed is therefore Ruslan Ponomariov (pictured) who most recently played an entertaining match with Hikaru Nakamura in St. Louis.
The tournament will be a 12-player round-robin event. The full line-up in Kiev is:
| Name | Rating |
| Ponomariov, Ruslan | 2754 |
| Eljanov, Pavel | 2712 |
| Efimenko, Zahar | 2701 |
| Areshchenko, Alexander | 2694 |
| Moiseenko, Alexander | 2679 |
| Volokitin, Andrei | 2677 |
| Korobov, Anton | 2660 |
| Miroshnichenko, Evgenij | 2651 |
| Kryvoruchko, Yuriy | 2640 |
| Kovchan, Alexander | 2558 |
| Vovk, Yuri | 2550 |
| Vysochin, Spartak | 2529 |
Games start every day at 15:00 local time (12:00 UTC) except the final round which is 3 hours earlier. The only rest day is 16 June, and the time control is 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 30 minutes extra to finish with an increment of 30 seconds/move from the start.
The total prize fund is 600,000 Ukrainian Hryvnias (approx 75,000 US Dollars).
The official website (in Ukrainian) is here, and the live games broadcast can be followed here. Some information in English can be found at the tournament's Facebook page.
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