Thursday, March 02, 2006

US Championship Round 1 Wrap-Up

So round 1 is basically over, just IM Feingold pushing on a dead-draw against a strong junior player FM Bercys. Apparantly he's trying to get the Bent Larsen prize for fighting chess by pushing for a win past the point Bent Larsen would have. As for the games I saw Friedel on ICC and congratulated him on his victory which was predicted yesterday on this blog. There were a few upsets that didn't make it into my last post and I wanted to include those as well:
Zatonskih - Gulko 1/2-1/2 (although the final position is a win, so probably a relay error)
Ginsburg - Christiansen 1/2-1/2
Tuvshintugs - Fishbein 1-0 (probably 2nd biggest upset after Friedel over Nakamura)
Yermolinsky - Liu 1/2-1/2 (Liu put up a very stubborn defense)
Airapetian - Federowicz 1/2-1/2
[UPDATED: Feingold - Bercys 1/2-1/2 official]

Likely Feingold - Bercys will also be a draw, but this could play out for a while longer especially with that pawn on the board to reset 50 move rule. Hopefull this doesn't come down to a loss due to time trouble, that would really be a shame.

All in all there were 12 upsets out of 32 games which is quite an impressive number, shows there will be a lot of tough games this championship if already in the first round the results are this volitile. There might be an update later with some annotated games so stay tuned.

No comments: