Three-way tie after four rounds Shenzhen Women GP
GMs Hou Yifan and Zhao Xue and IM Anna Muzychuk are sharing the lead after four rounds at the Women Grand Prix in Shenzhen, China. It's already the second event in the second Women GP series, less than four weeks after the first one in Rostov ended.
General infoThe second event in the FIDE Women Grand Prix 2011-2012 series takes place September 5-20 in the Wuzhou Hotel in Shenzhen, China. The participants of the event include current Women World Champion Hou Yifan and former World Champion Zhu Chen. Former World Champion Xu Yuhua is a technical adviser. The winner of the tournament will receive 6,500 euros out of a prize fund of 40,000 euros. The overall winner of the Women's Grand Prix will win a further 15,000 Euros at the end of the series. Players can only offer draws through the chief arbiter in special cases and the "zero tolerance" rule is also in effect, which requirer chess players to be seated at their boards when the games are scheduled to start. Games start at 15:00 local time (09:00 CET) except for the last round, which starts three hours earlier. and round 11 at 12 AM local time. September 11th (after round 4) and September 16th (after round 8) are rest days. Live games here. |
Rounds 1-4
The opening ceremony, attended by FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, included many choreographic and musical performances. The following picture shows once again how good the Chinese are in such things, always using the brightest of colours.
The first round immediately saw a tense struggle and three decisive games. World Champion Hou Yifan, who won the first Grand Prix less than a month ago, defeated Russian player Ekaterina Kovalevskaya. Zhao Xue and Anna Muzichuk won their games against Munguntuul Batkhuyag and Elina Danielian respectively. The next day the two Chinese winners of the first round had Black, but scored again. Zhao Xue defeated Betul Cemre Yildiz of Turkey and Hou Yifan was too strong for Batkhuyag Munguntuul of Mongolia.
In the third round the Women's World Champion dropped her first half a point to Yildiz. She remained in the lead with Zhao Xue who also made a draw, against Zhu Chen. The two leaders then took the weekend off; on Saturday they went for a well-known drawing line in the Catalan and Sunday was already a scheduled rest day.
Games rounds 1-4
[board]/drupal7/sites/default/files/games/shenzwgp11_r4.pgn[/board]
The playing hall which looks quite similar to the one of the Pearl Spring tournament in Nanjing (which, by the way, we heard was cancelled for this year).
Photos of the participants on the wall
School children visiting the tournament and watchih with great interest
World Champion GM Hou Yifan leads after four rounds together with...
...her compatriot GM Zhao Xue and...
...and IM Anna Muzychuk
Photos © Anastasiya Karlovich and He Long
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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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