“Amazingly, I’m still on first place after two rounds. No, even better, I have the highest tpr,” Anish Giri said after his draw with Sergei Tiviakov today. The youngest participant was happy to share his thoughts about the game with us. Judit Polgar missed a win with Black against Vassily Ivanchuk and so after two rounds all players have one point. In the open group Brodsky is the only player with 4/4.
The 17th Univé Chess Tournament, formerly known as Essent Tournament but sponsored by insurance company Univé this year, takes place October 16-24 in Hoogeveen, The Netherlands. As always the Crown Group is a 4-player, double round-robin with this year Vassily Ivanchuk (2756), Judit Polgar (2687), Sergei Tiviakov (2670) and Anish Giri (2552) playing for a € 10,000 prize fund. The time control is 40 moves in 1.5 hours + 30 minutes to finish the game, with 30 seconds increment from the start.
Round 2
Despite two more draws, it’s not difficult to describe the fighting spirit in the Crown Group today. Except for one board, the whole open group had already finished when Ivanchuk, Polgar, Tiviakov and Giri were still playing!
The game between the two top seeds was quite difficult – even to name the opening is not an easy task. We’ll just call it a Nimzo/Queen’s Indian hybrid. Anyway, Black’s play was very thematical and when she had managed to push d6-d5, Polgar was doing fine. Ivanchuk subsequently played quite risky and indeed was losing at one point. 46…Qd4 wins on the spot and Polgar did see it, but not the exact pointe – see the game viewer.
Giri and Tiviakov had a very different opinion about the opening variation that came on the board – a Catalan which Tiviakov had played before. “I said I looked at two lines, one of them which was equal and one good for me. He thought the one line good for Black, and the other one winning for him!” Giri said. Future opponents of Tiviakov should look at the lines we give in the game viewer, because they were all whispered to us by the reigning Dutch champion, who doesn’t believe in the variation for Black.
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