2014 Asian Nations Cup starts

The 2014 Asian Nations Cup is underway in Tabriz, Iran, and will run from May 20-30, 2014. It is a team event with men's and women competitions in blitz, rapid, and standard time controls. The first event is the rapid games competitions followed by the standard time controls, and finally on the last day the blitz event will be held.

Past events

The past open events and results (source: olimpbase.org)

The past women events and results (source: olimpbase.org)

Rapid competition

The seedings after the drawing of lots

The Kazakhstan men’s team upset the top seed Chinese team in the final to win the Asian Nations Cup Rapid Chess Team Championship in Tabriz, Iran. In the women’s division, the highly rated Chinese crushed the Indian women’s team to win the one-day event.

A view of the tournament hall on the night before the start

The Asian Nations Cup has three events, Rapid chess, Standard and Blitz. Ten men’s teams and six women’s teams are seeing action in this biannual event of the Asian Chess Federation. The Rapid chess format consisted of five-round Swiss system preliminaries followed by the semifinals and final.

Mr. Kambuzia, Vice-President of FIDE, opens the semifinal of the Rapid competition

China topped the preliminaries with nine match points followed by Vietnam with eight, Kazakhstan with seven, Iran A and Iran B with six match points each, India and Jordan with four match points each, Sri Lanka and Iraq with three match points and newcomer Oman with no team win.

Final match of the Rapid competition between China and Kazakhstan

The tournament hall with the games underway

The top four played a knockout Semifinal match after which the two winners faced each other in the finals. In the semifinals, China beat Iran-A 2.5-1.5 while Kazakhstan bested Vietnam by a similar slate. The finals were a tense struggle as three boards were in a tie. Chinese GM Ding Liren beat Rinat Jumabayev but Petr Kostenko evened the score at the expense of GM Ma Qun. As board two ended in a draw, it all depended on the game on board three. In an exciting finish GM Pavel Kotsur outplayed youthful Wei Yi to clinch the title.

The Iranian media interviews one of the female stars

The Chinese women team dominated the rapid competition as expected

In the women’s division, the six women’s teams played round robin preliminaries to determine the qualifiers to the knockout semifinal and final. China dominated the prelims with nine match points followed by Iran-A with seven, India with five, Vietnam and Kazakhstan with four, and finally Iran-B with one match point. In the women’s semifinals, China trounced Vietnam 3:1 while India edged Iran-A 2.5-1.5 as Harika Dronavali held Atousa Pourkashiyan’s strong attack to a draw. The finals were a decisive victory for China, 3:1 on wins by IM Shen Yang and WGM Guo Qi  while the other two boards were drawn.

The Kazakhstan Team were the surprise winners of the rapid section of the 2014 Asian Nations Cup

Games for the rapid are unavailable.

Photos from official site

Links Official tournament site The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.