Early upsets in Gibraltar

On this rest day of Corus we have some time and space to pay attention to that other great tournament of January 2007: the Gibraltar Chess Festival. Two of the nine rounds have been played in what’s a huge Swiss group. Michael Adams, who played in Wijk aan Zee many times, naturally is clear favourite, as can also be seen in our poll in the grey column. He’s on 2 out of 2, together with Greenfeld, I. Sokolov, Rogers, Sutovsky, Ramesh, Zhu Chen, Efimenko, Roiz and two players rated under 2300: Salgado Allaria and Fogel.

This year, the chess festival is organized already for the fifth time in the overseas piece of the United Kingdom called Gibraltar. While the winter is finally doing its job in Wijk aan Zee, the southern point of the Iberian peninsula is enjoying more comfortable weather, so the participants probably won’t regret being there and having to follow Corus via the Chessvibes videos. And they’ll always have their part of ape watching!

In the ‘Gibtelecom Masters’ group, 169 players fight together, of which many won’t have a realistic chance to win the excellent first price of 10,000 Gibraltar Pounds (about 14,000 Euros). Of those who do, some players haven’t been quite as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. In the first round, Vladimir Akopian (2700) lost to Irina Krush (2449) and Ketevan Arakhamia (2437) beat Hikaru Nakamura (2651). Yesterday, Vadim Milov (2665) suffered a loss against Ramachandran Ramesh (2483) and the winner of last year , Kiril Georgiev (2661), was defeated by Zhu Chen (2518).

We have selected the most surprising games of the first two rounds for you. The tournament is doing a wonderful job providing the many games of the open groups already in PGN. Downloads: round 1 and round 2. But do visit the tournament’s website as well, where you’ll find lots more (like live streaming commentary by GM Stuart Conquest, every day from 2 pm GMT).