After the domination of the favorites in the first round of the European Individual Chess Championship 2016, in the second round we witnessed some upsets.
Round two brought many strong games, which resulted with many draws and few major upsets.
On the board one Czech #1 David Navara (2735) and Czech #3 Zbynek Hrachek (2598) faced each other in the top clash of the 2nd round. None of the sides could make any major progress and the games was drawn by three fold repetition in 29 moves.
Radoslaw Wojtaszek (POL 2722) outplayed Ante Saric (CRO 2594) after his opponent blundered, and Ruslan Ponomariov (UKR 2715) defeated Aleksej Aleksandrov (BLR 2592) in an endgame.
Maxim Matlakov (RUS 2693) and Laurent Fressinet (FRA 2692) are both on 2/2, as well as Ernesto Inarkiev (RUS 2686) after finishing their games in their favour.
First major upset is definitely a victory of Ante Brkic (CRO 2584) over Ivan Cheparinov (BUL 2685). Brkic had a nice breakthrough in Naidorf and soon the Bulgarian’s position collapsed.
Another big upset is the loss of the 2013 European Champion Alexander Moiseenko (UKR 2663), who played against Estonian player Kaido Kulaots (2566) with Black. The closed Sicilian was played, and it seemed White found a better plan to open up the position and activate the pieces, which brought him the gain of material and eventually a victory.
2014 World Senior Champion and 2015 European Senior Champion (50+ category) Georgian GM Zurab Sturua (2548) defeated young Polish GM Dariusz Swiercz (2656) in the clash of the generations.
30 players are in the lead with maximum score after two rounds played.
Some of the top pairings of the round 3 are:
Lupulescu vs Wojtaszek, Salgado Lopez vs Ponomariov, Matlakov vs Bok, Fressinet vs Zubov, Khismatullin vs Inarkiev, Yilmaz vs Laznicka, Andriasian vs Dreev, Ter-Sahakyan vs Jobava, etc.
Round 3 is on schedule today from 3.30 pm (local time).
Follow the live games throught the ECU website, with the new feature in the section LIVE
Photos courtesy of Tomasz Delega and Gunnar Bjornsson
