Moscow Aeroflot festival underway
2018 Aeroflot Open
Competing with Gibraltar for the strongest chess festival of the year so far, the 16th edition of Moscow’s flagship Open-A got underway today at the Cosmos hotel.
The top section of the Aeroflot Festival has a minimum rating qualification of 2550, clearly making it the toughest open of the year. Participating are 92 titled players from 24 countries, including 62-gms and 27-ims. Top seed is Vladimir Fedoseev. The official website can be found HERE.
The time control is a sober 100 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 50 minutes for the next 20 moves, and finally 15 minutes to the finish (plus 30′ per move). My sincere hope is that all tournaments follow this time control. It would significantly improve the quality of 90% or more of the published games.
Russia Chess News writes: “Many unexpected results happened in round 1 of the A tournament of Aeroflot Open 2018. The games on three first boards – Vavulin-Fedoseev, Vidit-Narayanan, and Esipenko-Andreikin – ended in draws. Moreover, Andreikin did his best to avoid serious difficulties in his game with Esipenko.
The major sensations of the first round were the loss of Rauf Mamedov to a young Manuel Petrosyan and a victory of a 15-year-old Kirill Shevchenko over Gata Kamsky.” link
Some games from round 1:
gm Sjugirov – gm Kotronias (1-0)
gmMamedov-gmPetrosyan (0-1)
im Xu – gm Alekseenko,K (1-0)
