Oro closes in on another record

After obtaining his second IM norm at the Americas’ Continental, Faustino Oro has a real chance of becoming the youngest IM of all time. In order to break Abhimanyu Mishra’s record (10 years, 9 months and 20 days), the Argentinian prodigy needs to score at least 5½ points at the Closed B Tournament taking place in Madrid.

The Madrid Chess Festival started on Monday and will run until Saturday. The festival features two 10-player closed tournaments and a 9-round Swiss open with 48 participants. Every game will be played with a time control of 90 minutes for the whole encounter with 30-second increments per move.

The organizers invited a number of famed chess personalities, including Pepe Cuenca, Levy Rozman (Closed A), Eric Rosen (Closed B) and Anna Cramling (Open).

Improve your pieces - a winning system you need to know

In this course, we will learn how to identify passively placed pieces in any given situation and how to improve their health by bringing them into active squares.

Schedule

The festival also includes activities for chess enthusiasts of all ages, organized at the Madrilenian club ‘Ajedrez con Cabeza’.

‘Gotham Chess’ among early co-leaders

The Closed A tournament counts with 1 player rated above 2500, 7 players in the 2400-2500 rating band and 2 players rated below 2400. In the first round, the lowest-rated participant, Levy Rozman (a.k.a. Gotham Chess) from the United States got the better of top seed Tomás Sosa from Argentina.

Rozman found a nice move to simplify into a superior queenless position on move 22.

22...Qh4, making use of the ...Nxf3+ threat (with the g2-pawn pinned along the file), forced White to go for 23.Kh2 Nxf3+ 24.gxf3 Qxh3 25.Kxh3

Navigating the Ruy Lopez Vol.1-3

The Ruy Lopez is one of the oldest openings which continues to enjoy high popularity from club level to the absolute world top. In this video series, American super GM Fabiano Caruana, talking to IM Oliver Reeh, presents a complete repertoire for White.

Black is a pawn up and can potentially round up his opponent’s weak pawn on the d-file.

The conversion was not easy at all and featured mistakes by both players, but in the end Rozman managed to upset Sosa and become one of three players sharing first place after winning their opening games in Madrid — José ‘Pepe’ Cuenca from Spain and Akira Nakada from the United States also scored victories on Monday.

All games - Closed A

All games - Closed B

Links

• Official website
• Full technical information on Chess-Results: Closed A | Closed B | Open