7th European Championships start in Kusadasi

7th European Individual Championships

The Seventh European Individual Chess Championships are taking place from April 4th to 17th in Kuşadası, Turkey. It is organised by the Turkish Chess Federation under the auspices of the European Chess Union.

There are 85 GMs, 37 IMs and 6 FMs from 36 countries in the Men Individual Chess Championship, and 2 GMs, 20 IMs, 1 FM, 27 WGMs, 22 WIMs and 10 WFMs from 27 countries in the Women Individual Chess Championship.

The total prize fund, including amateur and professionals categories, is €78.000. A total of 16 players from the men's section and 12 from the women's will qualify for the next cycle of the FIDE World Cup. The players are staying in the five-star Korumar Hotel, located on one of the best beaches of Kuşadası. It is also the venue of the tournament.

Kuşadası (pronounced koo-sha-da-se) is on the western coast of Turkey.

The beautiful seaside resort town of Kuşadası – further details here

The event is being covered on the web site of the Turkish Chess Federation, which has all the basic information. There is a special tournament site programmed entirely in Flash (and not for the faint-hearted). You can view the games live there, download a PGN file, and access pairings, standings and cross tables in Excel. Daunting. As of writing only the games of round one are available. As soon as the ones of round two are there we will add them to the file given at the bottom of this page.

The games are also being transmitted live on the Playchess server, thanks to the kind cooperation of the TCF, the organisers and our very virtuoso SysOp Holger Lieske, who somehow manages to relay scores of games using just two PCs. Since a very large number of games are running at the same time, you might want to try the following Fritz 9 feature to view the best one.

In the broadcast room click "Best Game" (or press F10). This normally loads the top game in any room, but here it will load the six best games simultaneously in the board window. These are games marked by the broadcaster as being especially interesting.

In the above picture you can see how the Fritz 9 client has loaded six top games from round one. In this mode you can switch on an engine and jump from board to board to see where the action is. Whenever you are on a board the chess engine will start to analyse that position. In our picture we are on the Ctivan-Ivanchuk game, which Fritz tells us is a "Queen's Gambit Declined, Semi-Slav without ...Nf6". Black has two knights for a bishop (White is pondering on how to recapture the knight on g3).

The Fritz 9 engine shows a 0.39 advantage for Black, after 1 min 22 seconds of thought at a search depth of 15/36 (all moves checked to 13 ply, some lines followed to 36 ply). If you get really interested in one particular game then you can double-click it, which makes it fill the entire board area. Double-click again to get back to the six board overview. If you think this Fritz 9 feature is really neat, and the author really cool for telling you about it, send us an applause on the Playchess server. Also to Holger Lieske for broadcasting and marking the games.

Picture Gallery

By Frits Agterdenbos

Hotel Korumar in Kuşadası, where the players are staying – and playing

The badges are ready, the participants can enter

Gery Walsh, member of the Appeals Commitee, gets a mugshot taken for the badge

Technical Meeting with Boris Kutin (ECU President, Appeals Commitee), Ali Nihat Yazici (TCF President) and Tahsin Aktar (General Coordinator)

The playing hall of the Men's section

Samba Cup and Aeroflot winner Baadur Jobava and his mother Liana Chkhapelia

The first move on the board 1 game Ognjen Cvitan vs Vassily Ivanchuk

Pictures from the women's section to follow in the next report (we promise).

Frits Agterdenbos, 45, lives in Heemstede, not far from Amsterdam, and was one of the leading chess photographers in the eighties. From 1979–1991 his pictures appeared in several magazines, including New in Chess, Schakend Nederland, Inside Chess, BCM, Chess, Europe Echecs and Schach. In 1984 his Dutch book “64 Schaakportretten” (in English “64 Chess Portraits”) was published. In 1991 he “retired” as a chess photographer to finish his studies and in 1997 he received a diploma as an insurance mathematician (actuary). Since 1998 he has been self-employed, working under the company name “Acturix”, which is his actuarial consultancy firm. In 2005 he picked up his old passion, becoming again a chess photographer, and publications show he still knows how to handle his camera. Now he combines his insurance job and chess photography. You will find his photos on Chessbase.com, Schaakbond.nl, and Schaaklog.nl, and many more websites and magazines. You can contact him under f.agterdenbos(at)acturix.com (insert "@" at the appropriate place).

Links

• All games available so far in zipped PGN
• First ChessBase report on Kuşadası