FIDE World team beats Azerbaijan 21.5-10.5

The President's Cup – Azerbaijan vs FIDE World – is an eight-round rapid chess tournament pitting the best players in the Republic of Azeirbaijan against a FIDE selection of top players from the rest of the world. The latter includes current World Champion Vishwanathan Anand and former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik. The games are played in the capital Baku, in the "UNS" Creative Stage theatre, starting in the late afternoon local time – 15:00h CEST.

Second day

The score for the third day was Azerbaijan 3½ - FIDE World 8½. The final score after eight rounds of play was

All results

We have not colour-coded the names above, but you can easily identify the players from Azerbaijan by their names, which all end in -ov. In the FIDE World team only Shirov has the ending. The average rating of the FIDE team was 2752, the average of their Azerbaijani opponents was 2703. Putting all results together we get the following individual performance table:

As you can see Vladimir Kramnik has the easily best result, with 6.5 points from eight games and a performance of 2977. Anand follows with a performance of 2850, with young Sergey Karjakin performing at a 2806 level. Naturally we must remember that these are rapid chess games, and the performances are calculated on the basis of ratings achieved in regular tournament time controls. But the slow and rapid strengths of players do not differ that much, and so we can take these performances as realistic. Note that all the players in the FIDE World team played better than their nominal ratings, while all the Azeri players were worse.

Vladimir Kramnik at move 20 of his seventh round game against Vugar Gashimov

World Champion Vishy Anand in devastating form on the thrid day of the event

Draw ratio: a relatively low 53% of the games were drawn, with White winning 31% and Black 16% of the games. Vladimir Kramnik won three black games, Anand and Karjakin one each.

Video reports by Europe Echecs

The video reports were filed by Vijay Kumar and appeared on the web pages of Europe Echecs.

Links Official tournament site All available games in PGN You can download the free PGN reader ChessBase Light to read, replay and analyse the PGN games. It also gives you immediate access to the Playchess.com server.