2008 Arctic Chess Challenge

Arctic Chess Challenge 2008 started in Tromsø Saturday with 90 participants from 17 Countries including Russia, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Slovakia, England, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Scotland, Finnland, Denmark, Belarus, The Faroe Islands , The Nederland’s and Zambia. Top rated players are GM Igor Kurnosov 2617 Russia, Vadim Malakhatko 2612 Belgium, Simen Agdestein 2583 Norway and GM Vitaly Kunin 2532 Germany. An interesting start is also IM Amon Simutowe 2459 from Zambia who will be the first player Sub-Sahara to achieve the Grandmaster title if he reaches an elo above 2500.

The first rounds of all International tournaments like Arctic Chess Challenge are seeded and this means that most results in the first round you can predict. But as we saw last year, when GM De Firmian lost and GM Carlsen drew, everything is possible… Anyway, we didn’t get the big surprises the year. All the Grandmasters won quite smoothly and even the 3 IMs didn’t have a hard time winning their games, so did the two WIM’s. But several of the FM’s were struggling and Magnus’ sister Ellen Øen Carlsen (1874) drew FM Peter J. Sowray (2327) and Brian Smith (1803) drew FM Richard Bjerke (2212). The biggest upset among the untitled players was Rune Handberg with an national elo of 1621 beating Torben Søraas (2178) quite convincing.

Official website: http://www.arcticchess.org/