Cvitan triumphs

BIEL (SWITZERLAND), JULY 30. Grandmaster O. Cvitan of Croatia won the marathon blitz chess tournament held on the rest day in the 33rd Biel chess festival.

The highly tiresome but enjoyable event, where each player gets only 5 minutes per game, was held in two parts. In the first part, players were divided into seven groups of 16 players each, who played a 15 round-robin within the group. Five players were selected from each group for the second part which was a 9-round Swiss event.

GM Cvitan and IM D. Pikula of Yagoslavia tied for the first place in the final Swiss event with 7 points. Cvitan was declared winner on better Bucholz score. Gm N.Rashrovsky finished third with 6.5 points.

Indian players R.B. Ramesh, V.Saravanan, P.Konguvel and S.Kidambi qualified comfortably from their groups to the Swiss event, where the going got tough.

Konguvel scored 5 points to be placed 15th, while Ramesh and Kidambi, who had an excellent start, faltered towards the end to finish on 4.5 points and 4 points respectively. Saravanan made 3.5 points. Six rounds remain to be played in the main open tournament.

In the category-16, GM tournament, 5 rounds remain to be played and it will be interesting to watch whether Gelfand and Van Wely can minimise Peter Svidler's domination of the event.

- UNI

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Sport
Previous : Shivananda shocks Ravi Hegde
Next     : Sri Lanka to play Pakistan in Dubai