Four lead at Limburg Open
Traditionally many open tournaments take place during the Whitsun weekend and the Limburg Open is one of them. In the third edition of the tournament, four rounds have been played and at the moment GMs Berg and Solodovnichenko and IMs Brandenburg and Spoelman are leading with 3.5/4.The third ENCI Limburg Open is held May 29 - June 1st in Maastricht, The Netherlands. It's a 7-round Swiss with a total of 289 participants; 96 in the top group. The € 10,000 prize fund (with a first prize of € 2250) has attracted several strong foreign players as well as a number of Dutch rising stars.The tournament uses an accelarated pairings system which meant that the favorites didn't have a very easy first round on Friday evening. However, due to an inaccuracy by the arbiters all of them played with the white pieces. Dutch GM Sipke Ernst dropped half a point against FM Jochen Wigger on board 2 and 2008 co-winner GM Klimov also started with a draw against Joost Heltzel.The second round, on Saturday morning, saw many draws while GM Arun Prasad lost to IM Zaragatski, who went on to beat GM Kunin in round 3. Another upset was FM Stefan Kuipers beating GM Dgebuadze, and quite convincingly.In round 4 only GMs Berg and Solodovnichenko and IMs Brandenburg and Spoelman won at the top boards and they are the ones who share the lead at the moment of writing. A tough evening round is about to start, with Berg-Spoelman and Brandenburg-Solodovnichenko on the top boards. Click on Tournament Coverage at the tournament website for a link to the live games.[TABLE=734]Game viewer
Click on the pairings at the top of the board to reveal a drop down list of all the games. Click on the arrow under the board just once, then the arrow keys of your keyboard also work.
The venue is the building of Leeuwenborgh Opleidingen (College) in Maastricht
The weather is beautiful in Limburg but luckily not like last year, when a temparature of above thirty degrees Celcius had a greenhouse effect on the playing hall!
On top after four rounds: GM Emanuel Berg (Sweden)...
...GM Yuri Solodovnichenko (Ukraine)...
...IM (but GM after the next FIDE Congress) Wouter Spoelman...
...and IM Daan Brandenburg
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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