World Cup 2009 - Round 1

The first round of the 2009 Chess World Cup in Khanty Mansiysk has been completed, and the top seeds managed to get through unscathed.

The highest rated player to fail to make the next round was no.16 seed, Sergei Movsesian (pictured, Elo 2718), who lost the first game of his 2-game match with Yu Yangyi (Elo 2527) of China and couldn't recover in game 2.  These mini-matches can be brutal in their brevity.

However, plenty of other favourites had to work hard to advance to the second round.  Leinier Dominguez (2719) drew both regular games, and three rapid games with Australian David Smerdon (2525) before winning the final rapid game to progress.

Arkadij Naiditsch (2689) also needed all four rapid tie-break games to squeeze past the brilliant 15-year old Chinese girl Hou Yifan.

David Navara, Etienne Bacrot and Ivan Cheparinov were taken to tie-breaks before winning through, but less fortunate notable casualties from the first round include Gabriel Sargassian, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Ray Robson and Emil Sutovsky.

No sudden-death "Armageddon" games were needed, but it was a close run thing in the match between Varuzhan Akobian and Pavel Tregubov, where the former won the final blitz game to break the tie 9-7 (at 8-8 the sudden-death game would have been played).

The easiest match victory of the round went to Judit Polgar, whose opponent withdrew from the event at the last minute.

The full results of round 1 can be found at this page on the official site.  The pgn scores of all the games can be found here.

The first games of round 2 start tomorrow at 3pm local time.