Junior Speed Chess Championship: Martirosyan Too Strong For Keymer
GM Haik Martirosyan defeated GM Vincent Keymer convincingly in their round of 16 match in the Junior Speed Chess Championship presented by ChessKid. The Armenian grandmaster won in all three time controls.
The next match in the championship is GM Hans Niemann vs. IM Christopher Yoo on Thursday, July 8 at 10 a.m. PT / 19:00 Central Europe.
The live broadcast of the match.
It was the most lopsided match in the championship so far, but the 16-year-old Keymer (@VincentKeymer) from Mainz, Germany took it well. Afterward, he was speaking about trying to learn from it, and that's the spirit!
20-year-old Martirosyan (@Micki-taryan on Chess.com) from Byuravan, Armenia won all three segments, scoring 5.5-2.5 in the 5|1, 7-2 in the 3|1, and 8-1 in the 1|1 segments.
He took off right away with two wins, but Keymer actually leveled the score with two wins on his part. Here's game four:
An important game was the seventh because Keymer, who was down two points again, got a winning position but ended up losing it:
With that one and many other games, Martirosyan definitely deserves credit for making life hard for his opponent even in lost positions. How he won the penultimate bullet game, for example, was unbelievable:
Martirosyan was humble afterward: "I think I was just lucky because I had not such good positions, especially with Black. OK, I can say that I'm lucky today!"
Keymer: "Generally, my problem was that, technically, Haik played just extremely well throughout the whole match."
Keymer earned $105.77 based on win percentage; Martirosyan won $500 for the victory plus $394.23 on percentage, totaling $894.23. He moves on to the quarterfinals, where he will GM Arjun Erigaisi.
All games
The Chess.com 2021 Junior Speed Chess Championship is an online competition for top junior players. The qualifiers for the event were held June 7-21, while the main event runs July 1-August 8. Players battle for their shares of a total prize fund of $35,000 and a spot in the Speed Chess Championship later this year. More info here; live games here.
Previous reports:
- Junior Speed Chess Championship: Tabatabaei Knocks Out Smirnov
- Junior Speed Chess: Record Comeback Maghsoodloo vs. Praggnanandhaa
- Junior Speed Chess Championship: Erigaisi Beats Shevchenko
- Sadhwani Beats Pultinevicius As Junior Speed Chess Championship Gets Underway
- Junior Speed Chess Championship Main Event Starts Thursday
