The 75th Daniel Noteboom Weekend Tournament was held at the Corpus Congress Centre in the town of Leiden from the 13th to 15th of February 2015. The chief Sponsor for the event was Corpus. The tournament had three different groups. Group A was for players above the rating of 1900, group B for players between the rating of 1600 and 2000 and group C for players below 1700. All the three tournaments had six rounds. However, the main event was definitely the “Corpus Vierkamp” which had four of Netherlands best chess players pitted against each other in a round-robin tournament.
Part one of this report was published yesterday
Overnight leader Jan Timman was stopped in his tracks in the final round by Predrag Nikolic. After losing the first round to van Wely, Nikolic did really well to make a comeback and win both his remaining games. Thus he ended the tournament with 2.0/3. Everything now depended on the game between Smeets and van Wely. A catastrophic loss like the one van Wely experienced against Timman on the previous day would have destroyed the next game of any player. But Loek van Wely is not just any player. He has seen too many ups and downs in his illustrious career to be affected by them. He came out all guns blazing against Smeets and obtained a winning position.
Smeets has just moved his queen from g5 to f6. Van Wely can win the game by simply taking the knight: 36…dxc2. Now 37.Rxd7 loses to c1Q with a quick mate. What van Wely might have missed after 36…dxc2 is 37.Qh8+ Ke7 38. Qf6+ Ke8 39 Qh8+ and now the black queen interposes with 39…Qf8 and it is all over. Instead of taking the knight, black sacrificed his bishop with Bxg2+ and after a few moves the critical position was reached once again.
The players had already repeated the position twice with Kf8, Qh8+ and Ke7, Qf6+. The ball was in van Wely’s court. A draw would take him to 1.5/3 and would let Nikolic become the champion. He made an extremely courageous decision of continuing the game here with the move 44…Kd7, giving up both his f7 and e6 pawns with checks!
The crucial moment of the game. Van Wely had a difficult decision to make.
To take a draw or to continue. He chose the latter!
Fortune favours the brave is a maxim not created without basis! Both the kings were completely exposed and even a small mistake would prove fatal. Van Wely’s gamble worked out to perfection as Smeets couldn’t find the most accurate moves to maintain the balance. He blundered and Loek mated the white king! A grand finale!
There are some games which just give you the pleasure of playing. This was one of them!
The brave King Loek edged out Nikolic as he had beaten him
in their individual encounter and claimed the winner’s cup!
A pretty solid performance by the 54-year-old Predrag Nikolic
The A group had many strong players like:
Daniel Fridman (2651) finished fourth with 5.0/6 points
Sergey Fedorchuk (2643) finised 17th with 4.0/6 points
Viacheslav Ikonnikov (2558), 29th, with 3.5/6 points
IM Mark van der Werf (2400) was leading the tournament with a perfect score of 5.0/5
but had to settle for the third place after a last round loss to the eventual winner
But the tournament was won by GM Namig Guliyev (2536)
who scored 5.5/6 and went back home richer by €1400
Second place went to the strongest Dutch female player GM Peng Zhaoqin
The complete list of final standings can be seen here.
Philippe Friesen won the B Group
Winner of the C group: Jan Vriends
Experienced grandmaster John van der Wiel was the commentator for the games of the elite category
In the lounge many players would indulge in blitz and analysis.
Can you identify the lady in the orange jacket?
Of course, she none other than the 2014 Dutch Women Champion Anne Haast
Anne also gave a simul to nearly 35 young kids. She was joined in the simul by …
… Jorden van Foreest, the European Youth Champion in 2013, who gave a simul
on the other 35 boards – and won all his games.
Anne lost one game that was against the 13-year-old Jorre
The Noteboom Chess Festival was very well organized by Rudy Van Wessel and his team. The event had elite players, a beautiful venue, a world class commentator and many interesting side events. On a parting note I would like to leave the readers with the game which won the “beautiful game” prize of the event.
Pictures by Folkert Geersma
If you are interested to learn the Noteboom Variation the following DVD is perfect for you:
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LinksYou can use ChessBase 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs to replay the games in PGN. You can also download our free Playchess client, which will in addition give you immediate access to the chess server Playchess.com. |
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The Triangle Setup - A complete defense against 1.d4
