Ivanchuk grabs sole lead in Bazna
With a blitzkrieg against Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu, beating the Romanian in a mere 24 moves, Vassily Ivanchuk grabbed sole lead at the Kings Tournament in Bazna, as co-leader Boris Gelfand drew with Radjabov. Alexei Shirov also won his second game against Gata Kamsky.
The 3rd Kings Tournament, a six-player round-robin with Radjabov, Ivanchuk, Shirov, Gelfand, Kamsky and Nisipeaniu, takes place June 14-25 in Bazna, Romania.
Round 6
This first round of the second half was a copy of the first round of the tournament as Ivanchuk and Shirov also won their return games against Nisipeanu and Kamsky. The first to finish was Vassily Ivanchuk, who will drop big time in the July rating list but is currently the proud leader of the Kings Tournament!The Ukrainian refuted a pawn sacrifice by yet again an over-creative Nisipeanu behind the board; the Romanian never got close to the white king. Just after Ivanchuk had given back the extra pawn in return for a better endgame Nisipeanu committed another error and suddenly couldn't prevent losing more material.
Alexei Shirov must have spent his rest day well as he recoved from his loss against Gelfand in the previous round with a win against Kamsky. The American's play looked questionable at first sight, but in fact there were many hidden pointes and Black was probably doing not so bad if he had gone for 25...h5.
Gelfand with White against Radjabov, that's good news for fans of the King's Indian! The Israeli grandmaster chose the 9.Nd2 line, but Radjabov surely knows his way in all rooms and chambers of the big KID residence. He manoeuvered nicely in a position that seemed slightly better for White and after an interesting exchange sacrifice by Gelfand the position remained dynamically balanced. At move 37 the players agreed to a draw.
Games round 6
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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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