Timofeev & Muzychuk win Moscow Open

Artyom Timofeev has won this year's Moscow Open, after a marathon last-round game against the leader Ernesto Inarkiev, who had just won 7 games in a row. Anna Muzychuk won the ladies tournament.

Timofeev became clear first with 7.5 out of 9, before Alexander Riazantsev and Sergey Volkov. Anna Muzychuk (Slovenia) won the ladies tournament with 8 out of 9, after a quick last-round draw against Harika Dronavalli (India).

And so the tournament was won by two quite young players. 23-year old Artyom Timofeev, the current no. 51 in the world, isn't participating in youth events anymore. But when he did, he was quite successful, winning the European Youth Ch Under 18 in 2000 and becoming Russian Champion Under 20 five years later.

The succes was even more special for Anna Muzychuk, who at only 17 years old is becoming a very strong player very fast. She was born as a Ukrainian but is now representing Slovenia. She's third in the world in the girls under 20 list, behind Hou Yifan and Katarina Lahno. But Anna can play strong chess for quite a while already, if we take this interview of four years ago (!) into account.

Update: As Joel Benjamin notes, in his New York Times blog, at the Moscow Open the prizes were devided a bit differently than usual:

The custom in most tournaments is to split prizes. The tie for second through 10th place would normally be resolved by adding those nine prizes together and dividing them up equally. The Moscow Open, however, decided everything by tiebreak. (European tournaments occasionally use the same practice. Aeroflot will use something called the Hort system, which combines tiebreaking and splitting prizes.) The first tiebreak, generally known as cumulative or progressive, gave the second prize (350,000 rubles, about $14,000) to Alexander Riazantsev, the early leader, and third (250,000 rubles, about $10,000) to Sergey Volkov (silver and bronze, according to the website). Inarkiev would have won the secondary tiebreak; he was the only player to win seven games. But a first-round loss is crippling in cumulative tiebreaks. Inarkiev had a share of the lead after round six and seven and the clear lead after round eight. But he had to settle for seventh place, a haul of 140,000 rubles, about $5,600.

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Full final standings here.

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Full final standings here.

A small selection of some great games:



External links:

• Tournament website
• Games in PGN