Nils Grandelius emerged as the winner of the Reykjavik Open

The capital city of Iceland is a popular place among chess players. Reykjavik gave home to one of the strongest open tournaments of the year, the Reykjavik Open, this time from the 29th of March to the 4th of April. The nine-round Swiss system had a time control of 90 minutes for 40 moves, followed by 30 minutes for the rest of the game, plus a 30-second increment starting on move one.

The 401 participants came from 47 counties, 34 of them were grandmasters and 8 players with a rating of over 2600. After the third round, there were still ten players with 3 points. Grandelius was not perfect in this stage of the tournament, as he drew in the second and third rounds. However, Gupta had a terrific start. He won in the first five rounds and was the sole leader. He held it in the next two rounds with two draws. Mustafa Yilmaz and Maxime Lagarde also had six points after seven rounds.

In the eighth round, there came a change in the tournament’s leader. Grandelius defeated Gupta after a long and mainly strategic game and replaced him in the leading pack. Before the last round, there were five players within the lead: Yilmaz, Lagarde, Papp, Grandelius and Loiseau – all of them had 6,5 points.

In the last round, Grandelius showed an excellent performance as he outplayed his opponent. All the other games of the players with 6,5 points ended in a draw. In the final ranking, Nils Grandelius was half a point ahead of the field. Mustafa Yilmaz and Abhijeet Gupta finished in second and third place. You can check the full rankings here.

Author

LUCIA ŠEVČÍKOVÁ