Looking back: Abhijeet Gupta in Reykjavik 2016

Abhijeet Gupta in Reykjavik 2016

By Priyadarshan Banjan

The 2016 Reykjavik Open was a bit overshadowed by the Candidates tournament in Moscow and the Women's World Championship in Lviv. But traditionally the Open in Reykjavik has a lot to offer and this year this was no different.

The Harpa hall is one of the world's most splendid venue

The breathtaking view from the top tables' stage in the arena, one probable reason
why ACP voted Reykjavik as the second-best tournament in 2015.

Iceland is a place many people want to visit once in their lives, and the field of the tournament was again very strong. In this first part of our report on the tournament, we will go through the games of the winner, with his views and comments.

Clear first with 8.5/10: GM Abhijeet Gupta (2634)

The tournament was won by 26-year-old GM Abhijeet Gupta with a clear half-point margin. He stayed undefeated throughout and played solid yet interesting chess to win yet another open tournament. The event had a regulation allowing a half-point bye until the seventh round, but would Abhijeet take a bye for the safety of a half point and rest? "As odd it may sound, I just wanted to play chess and generally if I am not ill, I don’t see a reason for taking byes," was Abhijeet's explanation.

Abhijeet started off comfortably, winning his games without much ado. He summarized his start saying: "I didn’t really plan or prepare anything special for my start. It just happened and my basic aim was to continue playing good and consistent chess."

12-year-old IM Awonder Liang (2405)

Awonder recently became USA's youngest International Master and has an interesting future ahead of him. Gupta played a typical Sicilian with the black pieces and wiped out the young American.

He also played a beautiful Catalan in the fourth round,
which aptly ended with the Catalan Bishop performing the last rites.

After starting off with 4.0/4, Gupta settled for draws with English GM Gawain Jones (2645)
and Bulgarian GM Ivan Cheparinov (2684). "I think I was worse in both the games
so I was happy to draw those games and move ahead," he said.

GM Sergei Movsesian (2654) was Abhijeet's seventh round opponent.

The game looked like a clean display of textbook chess – any strong player would be proud of this game. But Abhijeet says: "It wasn’t as comfortable as it might have looked. He had a pretty good position after the opening, but after a couple of inaccuracies he gave me an edge and, with even my poor technique, I managed to breakthrough!"

In the ninth round, Gupta kept pressing GM Nils Grandelius (2646) until he crumbled in the end

With this win, Abhijeet Gupta had almost sealed his victory in the tournament. With one more round to go, Abhijeet chose to remain focused at the job at hand, which clearly defines his approach. "I didn’t look into it, I just wanted to play a normal game without thinking much about the result," commented Gupta.

Abhijeet easily drew his final round game against Italian youngster GM Francesco Rambaldi (2541) to be crowned the champion of Reykjavik Open 2016.

Final Ranking after ten Rounds

Full results and tiebreaks of all 150 players

Indian summer in the Icelandic cold – GM Abhijeet Gupta and IM Tania Sachdev

Tania, who recently featured in a report as a cover girl and chess teacher, scored an extraordinary 7.0 points, remaining undefeated in ten rounds, in spite of playing six GMs (two of whom she defeated). Her performance was a cool 2600 and she gained 30.5 rating points. So we can conclude that her marriage just over a year ago is working out fine for her. Here are her individual Reykjavik results:

Source: ChessBase India – Photos by Lennart Ootes

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN You can use ChessBase 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.