With just two rounds to go (the penultimate being played at this very moment) Moscow 64 is leading the Russian Team Cup as the only team having won all matches. A report with new game fragments from yesterday and the day before.

The Russian Team Cup takes place in Dagomys April 4-10, 2009. This year only 7 rounds are played in the Premier League, after the economic situation caused a couple of teams to withdraw. The Women's League is also 8 teams; the league below the Premier, interestingly called Higher League, consists of 10 teams, and started two days earlier.

The total number of 61 players in the Premier League make an average rating of 2639. There's a round every day, without a rest day. The rate of play is 100 minutes for the first 40 moves, then 50 minutes for the next 20 moves and then 10 minutes to end the game with 30 seconds increment for each move.

Round 4

In the 4th round Economist-1 lost 2¬?-3¬? to Tomsk; five games were drawn and so game Alekseev-Jakovenko turned out to be decisive:

Moscow 64 drew a hard-fought battle with TPS 3-3. On board one Gelfand won a nice, technical knight ending against Ivanchuk:

Round 5

In the fifth round Ural, the only team with four players rated higher than 2700 (Grischuk, Shirov, Malakhov and Rublevsky) drew for the fifth (!) time, against Economist 1. Moscow 64 defeated Tomsk 2-4 and thus grabbed the lead. In this match Caruana managed to beat the solid Tiviakov:

Links:

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