Evgeny Bareev wins Russian Championship

Bareev wins 58th Russian Individual Championship

The Russian Championship Qualifier was held in Kazan from September 2nd – 12th, 2005. The event was a nine-round Swiss tournament, time controls were 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for 20 moves and 10 minutes for the rest of the game, with an increment of 30 after each move. The prize fund is US $100,000.

The Championship ended fairly dramatically, with top seed Evgeny Bareev and sixth seed Alexander Khalifman (former FIDE world champion) both winning their final round games to tie for first. Bareev had a higher tournament perfomance rating and so was declared the winner.

The first seven have qualified for the Super-Final, which is scheduled to take place from December 2nd – 16th, 2005, and will include Svidler, Morozevich, Grischuk, Dreev and apparently Kramnik. For some reason word is that Motylev (number nine in our tables and on the official web site) has qualified, not Zvaginsev or Tomashevsky. If there are any corrections to be made we will do it here in this report.

Note: George Strain of Atlanta, USA tells us that the first tiebreak used was not performance rating, as the final tables imply, but instead was the "Bukhgol'tsa" (Buchholz) of the top eight opponents. Let us for a moment pretend that we can read the Russian original:

"Places in the competition are determined in accordance with a quantity of collected glasses," Bable Fish tell us. "With the equality of glasses the places are determined by the additional indices." Or, switching to real English: in case of equal points the following tiebreak criteria apply:

a. Buchholz, after omitting the result against the opponent with the lowest score;

b. progressive scores;

c. progressive scores not counting rounds 1, 2, etc.

"So Motylev's placement is in accordance with the rules," writes George Strain. "It also may explain why Khalifman and Bareev pushed hard in the last round; they had weak tiebreaks going into the final round."

Final standings (after nine rounds)

Statistics

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