Peralta, Naiditsch and Bachmann tie for first in Deizisau

Concentrating on important tournaments during Easter, let’s move from the U.S. back to Europe, where from April 9 to 13 another strong tournament took place. The central location within Europe of Deizisau (Stuttgart area) attracted a lot of people from all over the world.

By IM Robert Ris

The international character of the tournament is probably best illustrated by the fact that 713 players from 29(!) different countries decided to play in Germany’s most popular Open. The tournament was divided into 3 rating categories, of which the A-group (1800 and higher) counted 358 players, including 19 GMs and 18 IMs, who had to fight out themselves who could take home the winners trophy and a respectable amount of 2250 euro (14.000 total prize fund). Enough proof to have a serious look at the games!



Top seed was Germany’s number one: 23-year-old Arkadij Naiditsch, who recently crossed the important 2700 barrier on the April rating list and currently occupies the 33rd spot in the world ranking. Being the absolute favourite gives you always some additional pressure. Already in the second round, the Latvian-born GM had to suffer from a horrible position against the 423 points lower-rated, Hartmut Metz. Naiditsch got luckily away with a draw when Metz showed too much respect, allowing Naiditsch to give a perpetual in a worse queen ending.

After five rounds, only Ukrainian GM Sergey Fedorchuk had still a 100% score, followed by a huge group 4¬?'ers. Among them, GM Fernando Peralta who took over the lead by beating Fedorchuk with Black in a direct man-to-man fight. This crucial victory must have given the Argentinean GM a big boost, since in the next round he managed to grind down GM Alexander Graf in a nice attacking game.

There was a "funny" time-trouble game between Sergei Fedorchuk and Fernando Peralta. At the end Peralta had only one second for four moves and Fedorchuk 5-6 seconds and guess who won.

The only two players who were still in sight of Peralta were Naiditsch and the young Dutch IM Wouter Spoelman, who faced each other. Playing Black, Spoelman showed no fear and went for a sharp Najdorf in which Naiditsch couldn’t impress that much. After missing several wins (time trouble?!), Spoelman had to rest his case and defended the theoretically drawn Rook+Bishop against Rook ending correctly. Anyway, a nice performance by the Dutchman, who went on to make his second GM norm with a huge score of 7/9!

Another GM norm was made by Robin Swinkels. His black win over Graf in the eighth round made an important contribution to this fantastic result. Like Spoelman, he is on his way to become Dutch newest GM. Both guys have passed the 2500 mark already and it seems to be just a matter of time before they make the final norm!

The eighth round didn’t bring many decisive results on the top boards, so a relatively safe draw in the last round against the young Cuban GM Fidel Corrales guaranteed Peralta a well-deserved tournament victory. Despite the fact that in the end Naiditsch (winning against IM Pedersen) and Bachmann (defeating Swinkels and so recovering from his unnecessary third-round loss) collected the same number of points, Peralta was declared as official winner, having a better Buchholz than his rivals. With a Latin-American tandem and Germany’s no.1 finishing on stage, the tournament organisation can enthusiastically conclude that the 13th edition was definitely a successful one!

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Finally, for more info I can really recommend you to have a look at the official tournament site, which was perfectly keeping up-to-date by IM Georgios Souleidis (who also took the picture above).