Karjakin and Sasikiran stars of the second round

present, together with Parque Deportivo Multimedia and under the auspices of

The Canarias en Red Internet Chess Festival

The third qualifier of the Canarias en Red tournament once again saw more the 250 players participating. The winner with 11/13 was India's second strongest GM Krishnan Sasikiran (23), who led the field from start to finish.

India's Number two player Krishnan Sasikiran

The second place went to the 14-year-old Ukrainian GM Sergey Karjakin, who was playing his first games on the server. In this round people needed 10/13 to qualify for the final on Sunday.

Sergey Karjakin, who watches soccer while he is playing in a tournament

Sergey Karjakin is a true chess prodigy, who got his GM title and worked as second to a world champion before he reached his teens! Today there is a grandmaster, Magnus Carlsen, who is younger than Sergey, but Magnus completed his norms at 13 years, 3 months, 27 days, whereas Sergey did it at 12 years, 7 months, 0 days.

Sergey played the Canarias en Red qualifier with substantial handicaps. On the one hand he had a terrible dialup connection which produced substantial lags and often disconnected. Fortunately things became better as the tournament (and the evening progressed). One shudders to think how strong this kid would be on DSL. The second handicap was that it was for some reason imperative that Sergei watch the Soccer Champions League semifinal between Chelsea and Monaco. He would type in the results between rounds. We asked him to try doing a running commentary during his games, but that was a bit too much. Now if he had broadband... no, not even then.

Overall Sergey was a pleasant surprise, typing fluent English in the chat window, picking up jokes nicely and slowly becoming the star of the evening. We look forward to seeing him regularly on the Playchess.com server.

Third place in the qualifier went to Chess Today author GM Mikhail Golubev who has told his readers the secret to success in these Playchess events: have enough coffee in the house! Unlike in the ACP Inaugural, where he ran out of the sustaining brew, this time he has plenty and was rewarded with a fantastic Buchholz to easily qualify for the finals.

Mikhail Golubev, GM from Ukraine and chess writer, with his girlfriend WIM Carmen Voicu, who in 1991 was the U-10 world champion.

The other players to qualify were IM Thomas Reich (ritschi), Danilo Milanovic (Dahli), IM Sergei Krivosheia (samogon), Horst Lohmeier (UncleBob) and GM Mikhail Kobalia (guar). The two best Spanish players were Jose Perez (Josee) and Radek Kalod (Kalod), who also qualify for the final. In the case of Kalod the qualification is conditional to a check of his Spanish nationality.

The man in charge of it all: Tournament director Martin Fischer

Below it the cross table for the top 40 players. A total of 250 players participated.

The Canarias en Red Internet Chess Festival will be held from Monday May 3rd until Sunday May 9th, 2004 on the Playchess.com server, in the special Canarias en Red tournament rooms.

The qualifiers will be held from Monday May 3rd to Friday May 7th at 20:00h server time (=CET, GMT +2). You do not need to book a place in advance, simply go to the tournament room at the specified time and click "Join". It is possible to play in more than one qualifier. The final will be held on Sunday, May 9, at 12:00h server time (=CET, GMT +2). This is the time for registering, not the start of the games. Qualifiers and the finals are 13 round Swiss tournament with a rate of play of three minutes for each side plus one second increment per move. The total prize sum is $5,600 (€4,800), the winner takes $1,575 = €1,350.

• Full details about the Canarias en Red Internet Chess Festival
• All about the Canary Islands
• Download the games from Round 1 (700 KB) and Round 2 (550 KB), both in CBV format
• Download the games from Round 3 (650 KB) in CBV format