Popovic wins First Science Park Amsterdam Chess Tournament

The first Science Park Amsterdam Chess Tournament was won by Dusan Popovic (Serbia), Roeland Pruijssers (Netherlands), Alexandr Lenderman (USA), Nikola Sedlak (Serbia) and Adhiban Baskaran (India). They all scored 7.0 out of 9. Dusan Popovic, however, claimed the tournament victory on tie-break.

IM Roeland Pruijssers had a flying start, beating GMs Reinderman, Adhiban and Friedel in succession. After a loss in round eight, Sedlak, Popovic and Lenderman caught up with Pruijssers. In the final round Lenderman drew Sedlak and Popovic drew Tan, while Pruijssers and Adhiban won their games.

• View full results here

The tournament was held in the Sports Centre Universum at the Amsterdam Science Park.
The playing venue is located five km from the Amsterdam city centre.

Universum is the Sports Centre of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). It offers 9,500
square meters in many halls with a number of activities, like wall climbing. 

One of the side events of the chess tournament was the Open Dutch Championship in
"Schafeltennis" – a mixture of table tennis and chess. It was won by FM Rob Bertholee

Second place for GM Robin Swinkels (left), here playing chess with Lody Kulling,
who in 2008 played the Verbeterde List-variation in the Najdorf for the very first time

There were four groups, playing in the air conditioned sports centre. At 6 p.m. only three games in group A
were still under way.

Tournament winner Dusan Popovic (Serbia, rated 2569). He beated Lenderman and
drew with Pruijssers, Sedlak and Adhiban.

Shared first: GM Alexandr Lenderman (left, USA, 2525) was the only player who managed to defeat and IM Roeland Pruijssers (right, Netherlands, 2461). Despite this loss, Pruijssers performed 2679, his third GM norm.

Roeland Pruijssers vs Dimitri Reinderman: 1-0

FM Matthew Tan (22 years old) finished sith with 6.5/9 with an 2549 performance, scoring his second IM-norm. In the background is his younger brother Jonathan (17 years old) who scored 5/9 with an 2358 performance.

Hungarian WGM Veronika Schneider (2331) scored 4/9 and won a game on her birthday (17 July)

GM Dimitri Reinderman (2618) was in bad shape: 5.0/9, losing 23.6 rating points

The unpredictable IM Manuel Bosboom also scored scored 5.0/9 points

Tom Bottema (2247) is the webmaster of the Royal Dutch Chess Federation

In the 1990's Tom scored two IM-norms and had a rating above 2400. After that he stopped playing chess tournaments. Lately he has started to play again, trying to score his last norm to secure the IM title. He played this tournament is preparation for the BDO Challenger in Haarlem this August.

Tata Steel Chess tournament director Jeroen van den Berg (rated 1962) scored 7.0/9
in the B-group, claiming the shared second place

Wayne Welch (1810) plays a lot of chess tournaments. He scored 5/9 in the C-group

After the game it's time for a serious game of pool in the sports centre café

The winners of the first Science Park Amsterdam Chess Tournament: Popovic,
Pruijssers, Adhiban, Lenderman and Sedlak

Veron Roesink (1590, born 1999) won the D-group with 7.5/9

Every day Hicham Boulahfa (left) published a video report on the tournament website.
It's time for an interview with Roeland Pruijssers. Here are all the video reports.

Lennart Ootes

Links Official tournament site All games in zipped PGN You can also use ChessBase 11 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.

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