FIDE WCC R2-2: 14 games in four days

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Round two, game two report

The 64 players left in the tournament sat down and fought against their nerves, to see what would happen in the critical second game. Seventeen had won in the first round, and only three of these actually managed to reverse the result on the second day. One of them was Zurab Azmaiparashvili, who turned around a lost game to hang in there at the very last moment.

Slovakian Sergei Movsesian vs Hungarian Peter Acs

Sergei Movsesian equalized the score, as did Loek van Wely. At the end of the classic time control games 17 players had qualified for the next round, while 15 matches were tied, so that the games had to go to play-offs at 8.30 pm.

Nigel Short (right), prepared to give his all against Michal Krasenkow

At the end of the day another top seed had to pack his bags. Nigel Short tried hard to recover from yesterday’s unlucky loss, but Krasenkow hung on valiantly to get the half point he desperately needed to qualify.

In the classic games there were 8 wins with the white pieces, 20 draws and 4 wins for Black. This shows the high level of technique and concentration utilized by players at this level to squeeze out a match win by drawing in the second game. If the rapid games were drawn, then the matches went into tiebreaks. This consisted of two rapid games, and then into a blitz play-off, with a time control of 5m + 10s.

Valerij Filippov of Russia vs Loek van Wely of Holland

One must bear in mind that players who are knocked out in the second round will get $10,000 and the winners $15,000. However, when players have tied in the rapid games, they get at least 20% of this difference i.e. $1,000 and if they tie also in the blitz a further 20%, so the loser would get $12,000 and the winner $13,000. The overall colour scores in the blitz games were white +4, black +5 and 7 draws.

Vassily Ivanchuk vs the talented young Indian Pentala Harikrishna

Valerij Filippov and Loek van Wely played a total of six games – two classic, two rapid and two blitz. All were decided and in the end it was Filippov who qualified by winning both the blitz games. Ivanchuk overcame the talented Indian Harikrishna in the rapid games to go through to round 3.

The shooting star from Baku, Teimour Radjabov, who went the full distance to eliminate Denmark's Peter Heine Nielsen.

In general the matches were very close and, apart from board 2 (Smirnov-Elarbi), all the players were quite evenly matched. The maximum difference in rating on any board was 135 points. Rating difference reflects the expected result in a single game. When the difference is a 100 points the player with the higher rating is expected to get 0.64, with 200 points difference the higher rated player should get 0.76 and so on.

An all-Chinese battle: Ni Hua vs Ye Jiangchuan

After the eight blitz matches only Rublevsky, Filippov and Movsesian had managed to reach a decisive result and progress to round three. Dominguez-Malakhov, Radjabov-Nielsen, Hamdouchi-Kudrin, Mamedyarov-Lputian and Ye Jiangchuan-Ni Hua remained undecided. At 01.00 am they sat down for the sudden death play-off. In this game White gets an extra minute on the clock, but had to win or be knocked out. The result? Five wins for white! So qualifiers were Ye Jiangchuan, Dominguez, Radjabov, Hamdouchi and Mamedyarov. Ni Hua, who had been through a similar procedure in the first round, had played 14 games in four days!

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

Under the watchful eye of the patron [Photo Uwe Bönsch]

Results of Round two

• All the games played so far in zipped PGN
• FIDE report on round 2-2 with pictures and videos
• Interview with Zhang Zhong
• ChessBase pre-match report
• ChessBase day one report
• ChessBase day two report
• ChessBase day three report
• Statistics: Who will be the next FIDE world champion?
• Revised statistics for FIDE championship

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.