European Championship Rd3: Speedy Gonzales or Swiss Gambit

For players who are considered favorites or who hope to qualify for the World Cup, early rounds can help them to score the number of points they need so that they can enter a more relaxed phase of ‘Grandmaster draws’ in the middle of the tournament to save energy while consolidating their status in the standing.

Others who may have a rocky or even bad start could still hope to come back since the eleven-round event gives them enough room to win several games in a row and come back to the top of the table (if the earlier stumbles were due to a ‘hiccup’ and not just bad form). In this case, players may face less challenging pairings and they may turn their early bad results into what is known among chess players a ‘Swiss Gambit’ when the early bad result lets players play risky chess against weaker opposition and reach the top in the last few rounds.

However, most of the time these gambits turn into a dubious loss of points and instead place extra pressure on the players since the opposition they face afterward isn’t necessarily easy pickings, and certainly not enough to compensate for the early points they failed to score. Thus, the simplest rule is: let us win as much as we can and deal with difficult opponents when we face them!

It has become a common theme that chess belongs to very young players and one can only be a strong GM if he or she works at an early age and becomes a GM before 15 or 16 years of age. In such a no country for old men environment, the experienced GMs (so far!) have proven that 'those oldies are goodies'.

The leader of these GMs is none other than Armenian GM Artashes Minasian (2480). The Armenian , who has been a member of the national team in two important occasions , 2006 and 2008, where the national team won the Olympiad back-to-back, is a prolific and sharp player. The veteran GM has a very narrow repertoire (Fianchetto with either color almost all the time!) yet a long and successful career, most notably winning last the USSR championship which took place in a swiss format back in 1991!

In rounds two and three he managed to beat his 2600 GM opponents and snatch 3.0/3.

Artashes Minasian vs Mikheil Mchedlishvili

If a score of 3.0/3 by Minasian is indeed fascinating, then it should be noted that 68 year-old Yuri Balashov’s 1.5/3 against a 2625 average is no less impressive. Here we see how he won a complex endgame against strong Polish GM and ex-winner of the Aeroflot Open, Mateuz Bartel.

Mateusz Bartel vs Yuri Balashov

Experience does not come always handy though. Polish-GM and ex-European champion Barlomiej Macieja had a difficult third round game against young Russian GM Sanan Sjugirov. In what seemed like a benign endgame the Polish player got into ‘any move’ mode and started to make one mistake after another and ended up losing an instructive endgame.

Bartolomiej Macieja vs Sanan Sjugirov

Baadur Jobava vs Alexey Sarana

Standings after three rounds

Click for complete standings

Links

• Official tournament site
• All games in PGN or Replay them directly here (many analyzed)

You can use ChessBase 14 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.