Biel: Abhimanyu beats Pragg, Vaishali upsets Bjerre

Le grabs the lead

Press release by the Biel Chess Festival

Chess prodigy Abhimaynu Mishra came up trumps at the GMT-Masters in Biel. In the first round of classical chess, Abhimanyu scored a major victory: with black, he defeated Praggnanandhaa, the tournament's No. 1 and the world's No. 8. He thus moved up to third place in the standings, which saw Le Quang Liem replacing Haik Martirosyan at the top. While the latter drew with Sam Shankland, the Vietnamese player defeated Vincent Keymer to take over the top spot.

Le was able to benefit from Pragg's slip-up, winning the duel between the tournament's No. 2 and 3 seeds against Keymer. As the previous leader Haik Martirosyan drew against Shankland, last year's winner Le took over the lead on the second day of the GMT-Masters, where he is clearly enjoying himself.

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The Vietnamese player is followed by Martirosyan and then Mishra, who proved with his masterpiece against Pragg that he is a force to be reckoned with. After their defeats today, the two 2700 players in the field, Pragg and Keymer, are somewhat surprisingly at the bottom of the table – but thanks to the attractive award of 4 points for a win in classical chess, this could look very different again after the very next round!

The first few minutes of the round | Video: Arne Kaehler for ChessBase

Masters Triathlon - Standings

All games: Classical | Rapid | Blitz

All games - Masters (Classical)

Three decisive results in the Challengers

All the games at the GMT Challengers ended with a decisive result in the first round of classical chess, so that the tournament table is already taking on clear contours.

Alexander Donchenko was able to assert himself by beating Ihor Samunenkov in the longest game of the day. He is followed by Saleh Salem, who defeated Marc'Andria Maurizzi, and Vaishali Rameshbabu in third place. Vaishali, the player with the lowest Elo rating among the participants in the Challengers, proved with her victory against top seed Jonas Bjerre that, as the only woman in the tournament, she will keep up the pace with her male competitors.

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Vaishali Rameshbabu

Challengers Triathlon - Standings

All games: Classical | Rapid | Blitz

All games - Challengers (Classical)

MTO: No walk in the park for the favourites

The second day of the Master Tournament MTO already showed that numerous strong players from the second tier will draw attention to themselves and demand everything from the tournament favourites.

The three top seeded players all drew their games and two grandmasters even had to leave the board as losers against lower-rated opponents: GM Sethuraman from India lost to the young Austrian FM Lukas Dotzer, while Romanian GM David Gavrilescu was defeated by the Indonesian IM Irine Sukander.

After two rounds, there are now 15 participants with perfect scores.

Standings after round 2

...128 players

All available games - Masters Open

The Beauty Awards

When so many games are played daily, it is inevitable that a few particularly outstanding encounters take place. To highlight these games, the organisers of the Biel Chess Festival have created the Beauty Award.

Every evening after the rounds are over, the most attractive game from the MTO, HTO and ATO can be voted for on the festival's social media channels. The winners will present their game on the live stream the following day and receive a small gift.

Replay the winners from the awards below.

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Links

• Official site
• All ChessBase reports: Biel 2023 | Biel 2022 | Biel 2021 | Biel 2020 | Biel 2019
• Live commentary on site  
• Recaps of the day
• Interviews post-mortem
• Tipeee to support the festival's livestream