FIDE WCC R1: Youngest and oldest falter

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Round one, game two

Not only did the favourites who won their games yesterday all coast through in game two. Even the two hiccup losers Azmaiparashvili and Bologan got their acts together, equalised and won in the tiebreaks. So all the top seeds are through and we cannot report on any sensational upsets. The only tragedy for the partisan audience was the elimination of the youngest participant, 13-year-old Magnus Carlsen, who was unlucky to draw the experienced Armenian GM Levon Aronian. Magnus fought valiantly, drawing both regular games and the first rapid chess tiebreaker. In the second he was ground down by Aronian in a rook ending.

13-year-old GM Magnus Carlsen, the youngest participant

The other two youngster GMs, Sergey Karjakin (14, Ukraine) and Alejandro Ramirez of Costa Rica, who will turn 16 on Monday, lost their first-round matches.

GM Alejandro Ramirez

The above pictures are from the event's picture gallery page and are brought to you be courtesy of FIDE (© FIDE.com)

Here are the results of the top 24 boards. Full results can be found on the FIDE site.

• All the games played so far in zipped PGN

FIDE Round one day two report

Today everybody sat down at the board with a higher degree of tension since a loss could mean immediate elimination. On the other hand other, some other players had an uphill struggle to neutralize a loss in the previous day.

Whilst seeds number 14, Zurab Azmaiparashvili and 22, Viktor Bologan reversed yesterday’s surprise losses, unfortunately for India, seed no.24 Sasikiran was knocked out with a second loss by Leonid Kritz of Germany. Of course, a draw favoured the player who won yesterday so in all these games the player who had lost was forced to play for a win.

Another relative ‘surprise’ was Morocco’s no.1, Hamdouchi’s victory over higher rated Motylev. Unfortunately his co-national, Mohammed Tissir was eliminated by the strong Russian Grandmaster Dreev. Ghaem Maghami from Iran also achieved the double over Vaganian with a convincing win in an Alekhine’s defense.

The tournament’s youngest player Magnus Carlsen of Norway drew quite solidly against Aronian in the classical time control game. On the other hand 14-year old Karjakin unfortunately lost and is out of the Championship. One must objectively say that the results of these matches should not really be defined as big surprises, since the difference in players’ ratings between these last few matches was not so great, although the higher rated player tends to be favoured normally.

Out of the sixty-four games today we had the same forfeits on the four tables where the player failed to turn up. In the remaining 60 games we had 24 draws, 19 wins for players with the white pieces and 17 wins for players with black.

The top ten seeds all proceeded through to the second round without any major hitches, although one must at least mention the draws by Kenny Solomon against Grischuk, Haznedaroglu of Turkey against Malakhov and Dableo against Nisipeanu.

The tension did not stop at 7.00pm however, since all those matches which tied at 1-1 had to face the grueling rapid play-offs. The players were given 25 minutes with a time increment of 10 secs per move to play all their moves. We had 23 tied matches in total in this first segment of the match. The play-off games started at 8.30pm and we had some hard fighting games.

Given the time limit the number of draws was significant less. In the first half of the matches we had only 7 draws which shows the higher degree of pressure (and lower quality of chess of course) that rapid games put on players. White won 7 games and black won 9 … again reversing the average scores obtained under classical chess conditions.

In the second half of the play-off matches we had 19 decisive results in the matches and still 4 matches were tied. This means that these remaining eight players had to play 2 more blitz games at 11.30 pm! For the record we had 8 wins for white, 10 draws and 5 draws for black. Despite a hard fight Magnus Carlsen was eliminated by Karen Asrian as well as Alejandro Ramirez by Kasimdzhanov.

The drawn matches were Vasquez-Vallejo, Vladimirov-Ni Hua, Felgaer-Jobava and Tiviakov-Sargissian. In the blitz play-off players were given 5 min + 10 secs. increment. Even at this late (early!?) hour everyone was still fighting to remain in the tournament and only Vallejo managed to squeeze the win against Vasquez despite ‘Kastor’ trying all he could.

So at close to one o’clock in the morning six exhausted players had to sit down for the sudden death playoffs! The onus was now on the players with the white pieces since they had six minutes against black’s five minutes. In the end Tiviakov won against Sargissian, Felgaer won against Jobava and Ni Hua won against Vladimirov to end a highly eventful first set of matches.

Round one day two pictures

The coach of the German team, GM Uwe Bönsch, has sent us some impressions of the World Championship and the city of Tripoli, where it is being held.

Looking back at the openings ceremony last Friday, with a giant chessboard on the stage

A full uniformed military parade in the theatre

The two most important guests: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, President of FIDE, and Eng. Mohammed Al Gadhafi, President of Libyan Olympic Committee.

Tripoli, the capital of Libya, as seen from the hotel window

Modern highways, the bay and the Mediterranean Sea

General information

The FIDE site, which is being hosted by Libya Telecom And Technology, looks well equipped to handle live coverage of the event. The schedule, list of players, results tree and games are all in place, there are reports and picture galleries. The start page is http://wcc2004.fide.com and http://wcclibya2004.com.

Live coverage

The live game transmission from Tripoli, apparently of all games, requires you to have Java Virtual Machine installed on your PC. This program is distributed free of charge by Sun Microsystems (and is useful for many other applications). Visit the Java check page to see if you have everything required for the live coverage and install Java if you don't. To follow the games click on "Live coverage" in the link list above. There is a "View" button behind each pairing of players. Many of the key games will also be covered and discussed on the Playchess.com server.

Schedule

Note that local time in Tripoli is the same as in Central Europe. The start of the games is generally at 14:30h, which is GMT + 2 and translates to 13:30 London, 8:30 a.m. New York, 16:30 Moscow, 18:00 New Delhi, 20:30 Hong Kong, 21:30 Tokyo, 22:30 Melbourne, and 03:00 a.m. (on the next day) in the French Polynesia-Marquesas Islands of Taiohae.