9th Karpov Tournament in Poikovsky

The 9th Karpov tournament took place from July 8th to 17th 2008 in Poikovsky. The average rating of the participants was 2691, making it a category 18 event.

After seven rounds of play Alexei Shirov was in the sole lead, with 5.0 points, followed half a point behind by two grandmasters, Dmitrij Jakovenko and Sergei Rublevsky (who had led the tournament before that). In round eight all games were drawn, except one: Alexei Shirov lost rather traumatically to Vugar Gashimov. That pushed the Latvian-Spanish GM into a cluster of four players, with Gashimov ascending to the same group.

In the final round all games were drawn (two in less than 20 moves), leaving everything as it was on the previous day. The finals standings for the tournament were as follows:

The draw average was 69%, up from 63% after the first seven rounds. White won a total of ten games, Black was successful in a total of four.

In our previous coverage of the event we gave a link to the "Russian Chess" web site, which had English language information. Unfortunately the page had malware attached to it, as a number of readers pointed out just minutes after we had published our report. The page attempted to download code with suspicious functionality. This could include trojans, link to other infected pages, or spyware to spoof the content of a banking site. It need not be the case – there are some innocent pieces of code that may look like malware to the heuristic detection routines of a virus protector, but in the interest of our readers we of course immediately removed the link. The brave and technically advanced amongst you can visit the site – www dot ruschess dot com – and check what is causing the alarms. To the readers who were close to cardiac arrest when their virus or zone alarms popped up we sincerely apologise.

Links Coverage by the Russian Chess Federation (in Russian) All available games in PGN The games are being broadcast live on the above sites and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download the free PGN reader ChessBase Light, which gives you immediate access. You can also use the program to read, replay and analyse the PGN games.