FIDE WCCh: top seeds win through

Links Pairings Tree World championship news History of World Chess Championships List of all players (with personal cards) Picture gallery Live coverage

Round one, game one

No big surprises at the top, with all the favourites winning their games comfortable – with the possible exception of Veselin Topalov, who arrived a couple of hours late due to airline problems. President Ilyumzhinov allowed this game to start late, given the exceptional circumstances. Topalov scored a full point, as did Adams, Grischuk, Ivanchuk and Short, the hottest contenders for the title.

The only true upsets were the loss by Zurab Azmaiparashvili (Elo 2679) to Morteza Mahjoob of Iran, rated 2478, and the defeat of Viktor Bologan (2665) by Mark Paragua of the Philippines (2529). Four players did not turn up and their opponents go through to the next round without a fight: 127th seed Abobker Elarbi, of Libya (Elo 2257) went through when second seed Alexander Morozevich (RUS, 2732) defaulted; India's IM Das Neelotpal got a bye against Milov; Johann Hjartarson automatically won match 35 against Sergey Kudrin (2557); and Vladislav Tkachiev got the bye in match 39 against Juri Shulman (2559).

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 report on round one with pictures and videos (!)

Round one pictures

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

Nizar Elhaj, Eng. Mohammed Al Gadhafi, President of Libyan Olympic Committee, and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, President of FIDE await the start of round one and the 1st move of the championship, at the board Michael Adams (England) vs Hussien Asabri (Libya). Gadhafi and Ilyumzhinov ceremonially made the first move for Adams.

Also present legendary FIDE president Florencio Campomanes and and Werner Stubenvoll

GM Nigel Short in a pre-tournament interview

Interviews

The FIDE site has extensive interviews conducted before the tournament with Nigel Short of England, Bulat Assanov (adviser to FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov on chess matters), IM Mohammed Tissir of Morocco, 15-year-old GM Alejandro Ramirez of Costa Rica, and Russian GM Vladimir Malakhov. The interviews include video clips in Real Media format (low and high quality) and for download in AVI. The latter are between four and 65 Megabyte in size. The interviews were conducted by Ali Nihat Yazici and Geoffrey D Borg.

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.