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Results First PreliminaryThe first preliminary of the ACP started punctually at 18:00 hours CEST (GMT +2). The tournament director was Holger Lieske, who has a lot of experience in events in this format. 18 of the 20 registered players appeared at the start, two, Elene Sedina und Zhong Zhang, were for personal reasons not able to participate. We will try to enter them at a later stage. From the start a phalanx of Russian players, Timofeev, Matveeva, Kiriakov, Volkov and Dreev, dominated the field. Only the English player Luke McShane and the Romanian Iordachescu kept in touch with the leading group.
The top seed in the group was Alexey Dreev. He quickly went into the lead, sometimes exchanging places with Svetlana Matveeva. Dreev was unable to gain a clear advantage and a disastrous finish with 1½ points in five games cost him the qualification. He missed it by half a point, which he should have gained against tail-ender Jonathan Berry (Canada). In the end the winner of the tournament was the young GM Artyom Timofeev, who had already given a find performance in the European Internet Championship in November. Artyom, Svetlana Matveeva and Viorel Iordachescu all scored 12 points in 17 games. Petr Kiriakov, also an experienced Internet player, had 11.5 and qualified for the finals together with the first three. The next four players scored 11 points each. Overnight all games were checked for cheating – computer assistance during play. We found no indications that any of the players was using a chess engine. Of course some of the games were played at a very high level, with some spectacular tactics. However, with GMs and IMs participating this is really no surprise. There was some suspicion about the excellent play by WGM Svetlana Matveeva (2496), who is the Russian women's champion and has a lot of experience on the Playchess server. But Matveeva was playing well over par and easily reached the qualification. A thorough overnight check of her games revealed that she had not had any silicon assistance – no chess engine was involved in playing the moves. Naturally there may be another human explanation for her performance, as many visitors speculated. There were a few problems: connections to Ukraine and Romania were, at least at the beginning of the tournament, quite difficult. TD Holger Lieske had to take some tough decisions in order to protect the integrity of the tournament. Fortunately no one complained when Holger allowed a few extra minutes for these players to complete their games. When the delay was unbearable Holger scored the game against the player with the lag. If you look at the table you will see that it was a very hard-fought tournament. Between the winner and place eight there is just one point difference. What one doesn't see is that before the last round six players were tied for first, with 11 out of 17 each. Two of them, Luke McShane and Viorel Iordachescu, settled it in direct confrontation: playing with the black pieces Iordachescu was able to decide the encounter in a fine kingside attack. I would like to thank all the players for their patience, especially when some of the remote opponents were producing fairly substantial lags. Naturally this is not pleasant for anyone, on the other hand the opponent can't do anything about the lag his service provider produces. Once again I must commend Holger Lieske for taking pragmatic decisions to ensure a smooth completion of the tournament. The second qualifier begins tonight at 22.00h CEST (GMT + 2).
Preliminary 1
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