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Blitz gold medalist Sergey Karjakin of Russia is sole leader after the first day of Basque system chess event.
Basque system is an interesting idea, opponents are playing on two boards simultaneously, one with white pieces and one with black. It makes the matches really exciting. One of the most important parts is the time management.
Sergey Karjakin already in the first round appeared to has a good strategy, he won his match vs rapid silver medalist Peter Leko 2-0. Hungarian has an equal position on both boards, but he get into time trouble and made few small mistakes, which was enough to lose both games.
It was a good example how easy it is to lose control totaly when something is going wrong on one of the boards.
On the left board Leko is playing with white, after Nb7 position is close to draw, but as position on the other board is more complicated, Leko with only few minutes on the clock lost attention and played 42. Nc4+? lets focus on this game at first:
42...Bxc4 43. dxc4 Kc5 44. Kd3 g5!
Now white can't stop Ng6-Ne5+
45. Be4 f5 46. Bb7 Ng6 47. Bc8 Ne5+ 48. Ke2 f4 49. gxf4 gxf4 50. Be6
50... d3+! (50...Nxc4? 51.Kf3) 51. Kd2 Kd4 52. c5
52... Nf3+! The last accuracy, now white is helpless.
53. Kd1 Kxc5 54. Bf5 Kd4 55. Bxh7 Nxh2 56. Bf5 Nf3 57. Bg4 Ng5 58. Bf5 Ne4 59.f3 Nd6 0-1
Meanwhile on the other board Karjakin with white was also improving his position:
The passed pawn on the queenside plus huge time advantage appeared to be enough to get another full point.
In second round Karjakin won 1,5-0,5 vs top rated Levon Aronian from Armenia who is sharing 4-5th place with Alexander Grischuk from Russia.
2nd-3rd in the crosstable are Ruslan Ponomariov from Ukraine who lost only one game to the leader and Le Quang Liem from Vietnam. These five players we expect to fight for the top places.
Tomorrow it's the last day of the event, the last chance for players to get the medals and last emotions for the spectators. |
