Sasikiran wins 18th Ciudad de Pamplona

In a tournament chuck full of great chess games, Indian grandmaster Krishnan Sasikiran won the 8th Ciudad de Pamplona with 5/7 ahead of Malakhov and Vallejo. The Indian's expected rating change is +17 which will make him a 2711 player in a few days, and in Pamplona he won another 10 points!

The 18th "Ciudad de Pamplona" took place December 21-29 at the Iru?±a Park Hotel in Pamplona, Spain. It was an 8-player round-robin with Caruana, Vallejo, Nepomniachtchi, Sasikiran, Roiz, Malakhov Salgado Lopez and Delchev, who played at 2 hours for the whole game, plus 30 seconds increment per move.

Number one seed Paco Vallejo started with wins against Delchev and Salgado Lopez but then lost an interesting game against Caruana, which is still being discussed!

In the 4th round the young Italian continued showing his attractive, fearless and hyper sharp playing style against Sasikiran, but the Indian was the better calculator this time:



In the next round, Sasikiran also defeated Vallejo, but this time he was a bit lucky. In what was probably timetrouble the Spaniard thought he had to lose a piece, but there was a way to save it:



But "Paco" then recovered well and played a fantastic game in round 6 against Nepomniachtchi - one that will go around the world in newspapers and magazines:



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Links:

• Tournament website
• TWIC's games in PGN