Kingdoogie’s SPICE Cup Report

Spice Cup 2010 Round 1 Report!
by Kingdoogie on Thu, 10/28/2010 at 5:52pm.

Ahh the smell of chess is in the air as the Spice Cup has started!! As we all know Chess.coms own IM Danny Rensch is participating for the 2nd straight year and going for his first GM norm!

So I got there for the first round at around 12:45 (central time) and got some autographs from the players and talked to Danny for awhile. Then at 1:30 the opening ceremony started and they introduced all of the players. So at 2:00 the tourney started and all got underway.

The first surprise came in the game between young FM Darwin Yang vs GM Gergely Antal when Gergely didn’t play his usual Gruenfeld and opted for the QGA. This clearly shocked Darwin as he spent 25 minutes on the third move!!

All of the other games in the B group went fairly normally. GM Ben Finegold and GM Andre Diamant agreed to an early draw. Danny got off to a little bit of a rocky start losing to IM Dean Ippolito, but I know that he will get back on track.

The game between GM Davorin Kuljasevic and GM Anatoly Bykhovsky was drawn, and GM Gergely Antal grinded out a win against FM Darwin Yang. Also, IM Irina Krush had a draw against IM Bryan Smith in super long game.

For the A group young GM Ray Robson pulled out a draw against GM Georg Meier in an interesting Bishop vs Knight endgame. GM Eugene Perelshteyn had a draw against top seed GM Zoltan Almasi, and the game between GM Alexander Onischuk and GM Wesley So was also drawn.

So all in all it was a great first round, and tomorrow I will be sitting on the front row watching some of the best chess players in the world!

Source: http://blog.chess.com/Kingdoogie/spice-cup-2010-round-1-report