The champions at last! Courtesy Chess.com

Mednyi Vsadnik St. Petersburg Slips Through In European Club Cup

NM stevis5

Oct 25, 2018, 5:31 AM | 0

Valerenga Sjakklubb faced some tough opponents as the European Club Cup kicked off in Chalkidiki, Greece. However, Valerenga Sjakklubb had the advantage of a very strong Board 1: Magnus Carlsen. Carlsen sat out in Round 1 as his team took down Echiquier Amaytois 4.5-1.5. Despite the lopsided score, the match was closer than the other matches on the top boards. Let's take a closer look at some of the games. There was a pretty interesting, dynamic game on Board 1 as David Howell was only able to draw Twan Burg.

The other surprising result was Aryan Tari going down against Roeland Pruijssers, who has already played another infamous Norwegian in the PRO Chess League.

The biggest struggle on the top boards in Round 2 was in the Mednyi Vsadnik St. Petersburg vs. Itaka match. A crazy game on Board 1 allowed Itaka to get a reasonable score of 1.5-4.5.

In Round 3, the top match on Board 1, Valerenga Sjakklubb vs. AVE Novy Bor was very back and forth and decisive. The match ended up reaching a 3-2 score, as it came down to David Howell trying to find the winning moves under time pressure to get his team the tie in the match.

In Round 4, Alkaloid slipped through to take a victory as Ding Liren took down Peter Svidler in the latter's third straight loss.

Another team that was doing very well was Obiettivo Risarcimento Padova. However, they faced a pairing that was surprisingly close. Dunajska Streda put up a very good fight as Wang Hao went down on Board 1.

The savior of the match was Francisco Vallejo Pons, giving Obiettivo Risarcimento Padova a

3.5-2.5 victory.

Alkaloid tied Obiettivo Risarcimento Padova at the top of the standings in the final round. Slowly creeping up to take the top position was Valerenga Sjakklubb. Magnus Carlsen wasn't the one to win their match against Odlar Yurdu, but it was Borki Predojevic, former world junior champion!

Norway's all star team faced one last obstacle ahead of them: the top seed Alkaloid. The pairing that most were excited for was Carlsen vs. Ding Liren. If the World Champion won, he would break Ding's 1.5 year long streak. If Ding won, Carlsen would fall to #2 in the live ratings for the first time since 2011, being especially important considering that he has a World Championship match in less than a month.

There was one decisive game on Board 3 as the Russian Champion went down.

That put Magnus Carlsen's Valerenga Sjakklubb in first going into the final round. They faced another tough opponent in Round 7: Mednyi Vsadnik St. Petersburg. At it turned out, the Russians flipped the script on the two players who won the previous two matches for the Norwegians.

AVE Novy Bor defeated Odlar Yurdu to take a tie for first, just falling to second on the same controversial tiebreaks that are referred to later in the article. At the same time, Molodezhka tied Obiettivo Risarcimento Padova to secure a bronze medal, being led by Vladimir Potkin, who is often the second to Sergey Karjakin.

In Other News

Courtesy Chess.com

In an exciting event organized by Chess.com, two poker stars, Liv Boeree and Daniel Negreanu and two chess stars, IM Daniel Rensch and WGM Jennifer Shahade, played hand and brain while announcing the winner of the My Chess Poker Game Challenge. Here is the list of the six finalists, from 6th to 1st.

Pawn Wars by Christophe Stammet
Challenge Chess by Matt Matros
Blunder Chess by Alexandra Botez
Pokerhouse Chess by Alisa Melekhina
5 Card Chess by Jen Vallens
Chess Draw by Warren Sheaves

That wasn't the only exhibition event to take place recently as Carlsen traveled to Manchester to play professional soccer player Trent Alexander-Arnold and then to Germany to play in the PlayMagnus simul. Carlsen cruised to a victory against Alexander-Arnold, despite the latter having assistance from English prodigies Shreyas Royal and Kyan Bui as well as a special computer program that tracks what part of the board Carlsen is looking at. The World Champion also won the simul 12-0, maintaining his perfect score. In the meantime, Judit Polgar played a 20 game simul on the Chess.com live server, scoring 19.5-0.5, drawing 9-year-old Denis from England.

In my last post, I reviewed the 2018 Chess Olympiad from a unique perspective. At the end of the article, I mentioned that the tiebreaks were somewhat controversial. Grandmasters Peter Heine Nielsen and David Smerdon spoke out about the tiebreaks being unfair. In the previous two olympiads, the top spots came down to Sonneborn Bergen tiebreaks. The obvious solution would be just to have the top teams play each other. An example of that would be having the two teams tied for first play a rapid sudden death match against each other. That system was used for the PRO Chess League Finals and All Star Game. The way it works it that the bottom boards play each other and the winner moves up the ladder to play the next board from the other team. In the case of a draw, both players are eliminated. Speaking of tiebreaks, Norway Chess is changing their format so that an Armageddon game is played after every draw. This radical opposite of the Olympiad tiebreak system seems to be exciting for the viewers but not necessarily for the players. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave wasn't so happy with the odd format. "First of all I’m not a fan of the new time control, because it’s so much different from the time controls we have and it requires new adjustments. As for Armageddons, I’m very open to the idea but I think Armageddon always was viewed as a last case resort and this is too brutal an approach. In practical terms, it’s also unclear whether we found a balanced Armageddon time control where chances are roughly 50-50", said the Frenchman.

Mednyi Vsadnik St. Petersburg Slips Through In European Club Cup

Max's Chess Column