Gashimov and Motylev lead in Poikovsky
With two more rounds to go, Vugar Gashimov and Alexander Motylev are leading the Karpov tournament in Poikovsky with 5.5 out of 7. Interestingly, the two still have to play each other. So far poor Alexei Shirov has collected just two draws.
The 10th edition of the Karpov tournament, a 10-player round-robin, takes place June 3rd-12th in Poikovsky, Russia.In our previous report we focused on Alexei Shirov's bad start of 0/3 and unfortunately for the winner of the 2009 M-Tel Masters it didn't get much better.Shirov also lost in round 4, then drew twice and today he lost once more, against Onischuk. Right when he seemed to have stabilized his chess again, and on the same level that he's been mostly playing at during the last two decades, things go terribly wrong in Poikovsky. It makes you wonder - is he ill? There must be something else, not chess related, going on.In the meantime, Gashimov and Motylev kept their lead, and they still have to play each other, in the penultimate round which is today. Besides their mutual game, Gashimov will meet Efimenko while Motylev plays Bologan in the last round.We know by know that Gashimov is a very strong player but Motylev, who worked as a second for Kramnik and Svidler, also makes a very good impression so far. As our editors of ChessVibes Openings wrote this week, "for many years he’s been around the 2650 mark, but finally his hard work together with the world’s best seems to pay off." The Russian GM even managed to score a nice win with Black playing the Petroff, against Sutovsky. Many more good games below![TABLE=742]Game viewer
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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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