Six-way tie for first in Las Vegas

GMs Kamsky, Fressinet, Petrosian, Kolev, Friedel and IM Finegold tied for first place at the 2008 National Open which was held this weekend in Las Vegas.

The National Open is one of America’s longest running open tournaments. First established by Ed Edmondson in the 1960’s, Fred Gruenberg and Al Losoff have been responsible for the National Open for over two decades now.

It’s the biggest event within the Las Vegas Chess Festival that included a 20-board simul by Kamsky, blitz and scholastic tournaments, free lectures by titled players and the “Susan Polgar World Open Chess Championship for Girls and Boys”.

The National Open is a 6-round Swiss and players can choose between the standard 3-day or alternate 2-day playing schedules (half-point byes are available for all rounds). The 2008 National Open offered a $100,000 prize fund.

America’s number one Gata Kamsky had an excellent start with four wins out of four games, but then drew his last to games against Petrosian and Friedel, allowing five players to share the first spot.

Here are two games from the tournament. I didn’t get them from the official site nor from TWIC, but by copypasting them from Chess Life Online. The games were provided by Monroi and that’s very annoying because je have to register to replay the games, even after the tournament. I can understand that a tournament decides to let Monroi provide the live coverage, since their applets are indeed quite handy and you don’t have to hire a certified DGT board technician, but afterwards the games are public domain and so why not just put a little PGN file on the tournament website?

First we see a lucky Kamsky, who had a lost position against Mark Paragua from the Phillippines. According to Jennifer Shahade, after the game Paragua said that he should have played 24…Qxa4 instead of Rxa4, but 25…Rd2! still looks winning as well. Below there’s a nice attacking game by Petrosian.