IM Lalith Babu strongest at Leiden Chess Tournament
A contingent of 12 talented Indian chess players had travelled to The Netherlands, and in the end one of them emerged as the winner of the Leiden Chess Tournament: IM Lalith Babu. He was the only one to finish on 7.5/9 ahead of GMs Van den Doel and Savchenko who ended on 7 points.
Photo © Maaijveld The 3rd Leiden Chess Tournament (LCT), held July 9-19 in Leiden, The Netherlands, was organized by Stichting Denksportpromotie Nederland (a foundation for mindsports) and sponsored by H.L. Druckerfonds and Stichting Kasteel Oud Poelgeest (and about 10 other sponsors).The top group was a big Swiss open of 104 participants with 7 GMs, 7 IMs, 8 FMs, 2 WIMs, 1 WGM and even a WFM. The field included Ukrainians Yuri en Andrey Vovk and Stanislav Savchenko, but also the Girls World Champion U14 Padmini Rout, who is said to be "the biggest talent since Judit Polgar" but perhaps we should correct that to Hou Yifan? Anyway, they were all attracted by a total prize fund of 4000 Euros with € 1750 going to the winner of the A-group and 500 to the B group winner.Lalith Babu emerged as the only player to score 7.5/9, beating Serbian GM Milos Pavlovic in the penultimate round and then Georgian GM Sanikidze in the last round. Van den Doel and Savchenko did fight it out on the last Sunday, but eventually shared the point and second place in the final standings.Local hero GM Van der Wiel probably felt he was outprepared by the Indian coach, GM Ramesh, and after receiving draw offers at move 10 and 12 he decided to accept, only to find out after the game that he had just secured his opponent Daklia Shreyansh an IM norm!
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Winner IM Lalith Babu taking home a nice medal and what we believe is a GM norm
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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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