The traditional Aeroflot Open has started immediately after the International Chess Festival Moscow Open-2013, from 11-18 February in Moscow, Russia.
The first event is the Qualifying Rapid tournament on 12-13th February. The 32 top finishers qualify for the knock-out tournament, which will be held on 15th February, and thus secure themselves a minimal prize of 1 000 USD.
Six players have finished the first day with a perfect 4/4 score: GM Anton Korobov, GM Rauf Mamedov, GM Shekhar Ganguly, GM Ernesto Inarkiev, GM Pavel Eljanov and GM Sanan Sjugirov.
The first seed, American GM Gata Kamsky, signed a rather quick draw in the third round against a lower rated opponent, GM Zaven Andriasian from Armenia (2569 Elo).
Kamsky bounced back in the 4th round with a victory and stayed well within the 32 players field that will qualify to the Final stage of the tournament. Even though this might seem like an easy task for a player of Kamsky’s level, it’s enough to take a look at the list of participants to see that this is not so simple. The 32nd seed is precisely the recent winner of the Moscow Open, GM Boris Savchenko.
Another player who is a favorite but didn’t get 4 straight wins was Le Quang Liem. Le had a not so difficult first three rounds, getting his 3 wins in less than 30 moves. He showed once again that his opening preparation is first-class; thanks to this, he defeated his lower rated opponents in the early middlegame.
However, the 4th round game was slightly different. Guseinov got the initiative on the kingside in a French Defense where black chose tho take out his “bad light-squared bishop” to b7. With his king’s protection diminished, Le started to look for simplifications and, when it was clear that white’s position was preferable, Guseinov decided to make a three-fold repetition, showing respect for his strong opponent.
The new format of the Aeroflot Open has attracted a lot of Russian players to participate, probably because they feel they have quite a big chance to have good results in a rapid tournament. Will the Russians dominate the field against the foreigners?
Out of the 100 first seeds – the players that seem to have a realistic chance to qualify -, 55 are Russian. With this almost symmetric rate of international and local players, we should expect about the same amount of participants qualified from each “camp”.
Until the 4th round, out of the 19 players that managed to score 3.5 points or more, only 7 are Russian. However, there’s still a lot to play for with five more rounds to go.
So exciting/