FIDE Grand Prix - Geneva: Teimour Radjabov is early leader

The Grand Prix is being organized by Agon Limited, the commercial partner of the World Chess Federation, the game’s governing body. Agon has the exclusive commercial rights to organize the cycle of the World Championship.

Each Grand Prix has a prize fund of 130,000 euros, and the Geneva Grand Prix is supported by EG Capital Advisors, Kaspersky Lab and S.T. Dupont.

Twenty-four of the world’s best players are competing in the Grand Prix, with 18 of them participating in each of the tournaments. They will play a nine round swiss open played at 100 minutes for the first 40 moves, 50 minutes for the next 20 moves and then 15 minutes for the rest of the game plus an additional 30 seconds per move starting from move one.

The tournament runs from June 6-15, with a rest day on June 11 after round five. Each round starts at 2 pm local time (8 am New York time).

Round three

Photos by FIDE

The board that appeared the most intriguing was Levon Aronian against leader Teimor Radjabov. There was more to it than the mere sporting aspect, as both players had made declarations on social media in favor of their country’s history regarding the famous Armenia-Azerbaijan war. Still, if the sporting conditions and 100-year-old smacktalk promised plenty of action, the game was a fairly short one. A Bogo-Indian was the choice of Radjabov, and after aggressive maneuvers on the king-side, they shook hands. A pity since Black clearly could hope for more and continue.

Pavel Eljanov has certainly had the bloodiest acoun t of the players so far with three decisive games, with two in his favor. In round three, he met Ian Nepomniachtchi and it was a fascinating struggle.

Pavel Eljanov has had three decsive results so far, with two wins and one loss

Pavel Eljanov - Ian Nepomniachtchi (annotated by Krikor Mekhitarian)

Pentala Harikrishna came within a whisker of winning his game against Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, but the wily Azeri began to pile tactics on the position and notably near the Indian’s king to complicate affairs. His intent was a success as White began to miss moves until the dead lost position concluded in a draw.

Pentala Harikrishna

Pentala Harikrishna - Shakhriyar Mamedyarov

The final decisive game of the day was between Richard Rapport and Dmitry Jakovenko, in which the creative talents of Rapport were not up to the task of destabilizing the positon and the Russian out played his opponent, capping it off after nearly seven hours.

Standings after three rounds

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.