EURO 2007: Tkachiev and Kosintseva win European Championship

Eighth European Chess Championship in Dresden

The 8th Individual European Chess Championships (EURO 2007) took place from April 2nd to 15th, 2007 in Dresden, Germany in the International Congress Center. The event was an 11 round Swiss, with time controls set at 90 minutes for 40 moves plus 30 minutes for the rest of the game, with an increment of 30 seconds per move, starting from move one.

Final results

Seven players tied for first. The top two on tiebreak, Vladislav Tkachiev of France and Emil Sutovsky of Israel, faced each other in a playoff, which Tkachiev won 2-0. He was duely crowned Eighth European Chess Champion.

Vladislav Tkachiev, whose Russian name, Владислав Ткачев, is sometimes transcribed Tkatschjov, was born on November 9th, 1973, in Moscow. In 1982 the family moved to Kazakhstan, where Vladislav learnt chess at the age of ten. Two years later he won the Youth Championship of the country and in 1992, at the age of 18, he became part of the Kazakh Olympic team. At 19 he became a grandmaster and in 1995 he moved to Cannes in France, and now represents this country in sporting events. His greatest tournament victories were Oakham 1993, Cannes 1996 and 1999, Isle of Man 1996 and Makarska 1997.

Previous ChessBase stories on Vlad Tkachiev

• On the brink of madness – ChessBase Magazine interview with Tkachiev
• Mr Cool wins Moscow Blitz Tournament
• Vladislav Tkachiev: the blitz revolution
• Tkachiev and Skripchenko win French Championships

Top standings in the men's section

• Selection of games in zipped PGN (484 KBytes)

Top standings in the Women's Section

European Champion in the Women's section: IM Tatiana Kosintseva

Already a round before the end of the tournament it was clear that nobody could catch Russian IM Tatiana Kosintseva, who led the field by two full points. That distance remained in the final standings, where Tatiana's sister Nadezhda, former women's world champion Antoaneta Stefanova and Hungarian GM Hoang Thanh Trang (originally from Vietnam) shared the second slot.

• Selection of games in zipped PGN (204 KBytes)

Karjakin wins the EURO Blitz

17-year-old Ukrainian GM Sergey Karjakin won the EURO Blitz tournament, in which over 370 players participated. Second was Baadur Jobava of Georgia, third Alexander Riazantsev of Russia. Karjakin is well known for being the youngest GM in history, making his final norm before he turned thirteen. He is also the second-highest ranked player on the Playchess.com server (after the enigmatic "Raffael").

Awesome: Sergey's blitz progress in his last 280 games on the Playchess server

Links

• Official home page of EURO 2007
• Dresden as a chess ctiy