Drama in group C

In the last two weeks, we've paid attention to groups B and C of Corus as well, and so we should bring you some concluding words about these groups too. Where many predicted that group A and B would only be decided in the last round, it seemed for a long time that group C already had a winner. Ian Nepomniachtchi had a phenomenal start with 7,5 out of 8. After a few draws in the last rounds he had a score of 10 out of 12. Indeed his margin of 1,5 on the Polish grandmaster Krasenkow was reduced to only a half point, but the 8 victories, 4 draws and his unbeaten record, should have given him enough confidence for a draw at least in the last round, playing with White against Nadezhda Kosintseva. Things went differently.

Maybe he was nervous, maybe it was Nadezhda's pretty smile which made him lose his concentration. Fact is that he gave away an almost certain championship in the last round! He didn't stand a chance in his own game but to make matters worse, Krasenkow beat Peng with Black and in doing so he won the tournament with the smallest possible difference. In group B it was Pavel Eljanov who had the best credentials for winning the group. A victory over Tatiana Kosintseva would lead him to the title. It would have been something, if this Kosintseva too had spoiled someone's party, but luckily for the man from the Ukraine that didn't happen. With a victory over Nadezhda's younger sister, he won the group with 9 out of 13.

The Dutch chess players in both groups performed well in general. Probably Harmen Jonkman had wished for a better result, but the way he defeated Swedish grandmaster Emanuel Berg in the last round, might have made him feel good after all. :)


"^Reports^^^1170121339^1314786230^jerrel "Welcome new visitors"^"Thanks to the Corus Chess Tournament this site is enjoying a major success. The videos we have been making, were appreciated a lot - especially the press conferences. Since literally thousands of new visitors have come to the Chessvibes website during Corus, we hereby warmly welcome these new visitors. And at the same time, in this short article you'll find an answer to the question: what kind of site is this??

This is a weblog and web site together, and it's about chess. Our goal is to provide interesting articles about chess news, as well as background stories and columns.

It all started on February 6th, 2006, when the editor-in-chief started a blog for publishing and discussing chess games. Within a year, the site grew into a chess hot spot where every day one thousand unique visitors found articles of a wide variety, but all about chess. The Corus Chess Tournament then made the site world famous, thanks to the many videos we're publishing, raising the visitors number to thousands and thousands.

The Chessvibes team also grew the last few months, and amongst the editors we now have the GM's Erwin l'Ami and Karsten M?ɬºller and the IM's Merijn van Delft and Yochanan Afek.

In the annual survey you can read what Chessvibes has done so far. For example, also before the Corus Chess Tournament we published lots of videos online. A neat way to find these, is via the archives, under the header Videos. But you also use the search box in the yellow column, of course.

To conclude this article, we hereby take the opportunity to thank all our visitors. We really appreciate the hundreds of positive comments we received. We also thank Corus. They made everything possible and allowed us to film wherever we wanted. We realize there's no way back :) and we'll certainly continue with making chess news articles and some video's here and there. We hope you will keep on enjoying Chessvibes!

(By the way, check out the upcoming article. Something to do with Anatoly Karpov.)