Elina Danielian Wins Women's Speed Chess Qualifier

Elina Danielian won the 2019 Women's Speed Chess Championship qualifier on Wednesday. The Armenian grandmaster earned $750 and a spot in the first Women's Speed Chess Championship, where she will play GM Kateryna Lagno of Russia.

The qualifier was a first-of-its-kind event open to all titled women. They played a 10-round Swiss with a time control of three minutes plus a one-second increment, trying to qualify for the main bracket.

Danielian's tournament actually started with a mishap in the first round. Despite having warmed up before the tournament with some three-minute chess, she started with a loss vs. WIM Megan Lee (@MeganLee-SEA) of the U.S..

Halfway through the tournament, two players were tied for first place with 4.5/5: WFM Farah Yumna Budiarti (@YumiBear) of Indonesia and WIM Priyanka Nutakki (@Ind1anStar) of India. As it goes in Swiss tournaments , the two were paired against each other for round six.

Nutakki won the game to grab the sole lead, but not after she survived some scary moments early on.

The fun was short-lived for the Indian player, who lost her next game to WGM Hoang Thi Bao Tram (@meoluoi91) of Vietnam. That was a tough one, where Nutakki was winning most of the game but somehow refrained from using the key idea h4-h5 or taking on e4, and then blundered terribly.

After her first-round loss, Danielian was winning game after game and at the start of round eight she had caught up with the the leader, Hoang. The Armenian GM took over by checkmating her opponent, after what had been a fiasco in the opening followed by a nasty trick in the middlegame:

After an easy win against Budiarti, Danielian had scored eight wins in a row and by that point she was leading by a full point. A draw was enough, and that's what she got in a tense game where the clock and especially the tournament situation made her decide to allow a perpetual check in an otherwise completely winning position.

Women's Speed Chess Qualifier | Final Standing (Top 15)

(Full final standings here.)

Happy that I've just managed to win Women's Speed Chess Championship on https://t.co/NIWfXVBKUN and qualified to quarterfinal where I will face World Vice-Champion and my friend Kateryna Lagno 💪😊

— Elina Danielian (@Elinachess) May 8, 2019

Second place went to WGM Hoang Thi Bao Tram, who received $250. As the winner, Elina Danielian earned $750 and a spot in the 2019 Women's Speed Chess Championship. She enters the competition as the eighth seed and will play top seed GM Kateryna Lagno in the first round of the championship on May 22.

Like this qualifier, each match of the 2019 Women's Speed Chess Championship will be hosted by commentators IM Anna Rudolf and IM Sopiko Guramishvili and will be broadcast live on www.Chess.com/TV and www.Twitch.tv/Chess. 

The broadcast of the Women's Speed Chess Championship qualifier.

The Women's Speed Chess Championship will feature a field of eight of the world's best women's chess players, and a substantial prize pool of $20,000. The winner of the WSCC will also earn a place in the main Speed Chess Championship and its additional $50,000 prize pool.

Aside from Lagno, other key participants include former the women's world champion GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, the seven-time U.S. champion GM Irina Krush and the three-time European individual champion GM Valentina Gunina.

Be sure to tune in to www.Twitch.tv/Chess and www.Chess.com/TV for all the action of this year's 2019 Women's Speed Chess Championship and visit www.SpeedChessChampionship.com for more information on the other Speed Chess events this summer, including the inaugural 2019 Junior Speed Chess Championship presented by ChessKid.