Saturday, May 23, 2009

Asian Continental Championship final day: There's going to be blood!

Heroes of Olongapo City

What makes the 8th Asian Continental Championship a truly exciting competition is that the event is actually a two faced tournament. One, is of course, to become the overall champion of Asia and second, to land among the top ten finisher and secured an outright seat at world cup of chess. If you think the fierce fighting is only happening among the top five players in the standings, then you get the tournament dead wrong. The championship after all serves as a qualifier. Going into the final day, people who are in 11-26th place are also fighting their own battle. If you will look at the rankings after 10 rounds, you'll see the heavy traffic of contenders nudging to make it into the top ten. And that's where you'll see blood. Below is the list of round 11 pairings. From here, you can make your own calculation on what could be the possible outcome of the tournament.

Yours truly do not want to become a bias blogger in favor of our Filipino players but I say, folks, inspire us. Ibigay nyo sa amin ang araw na ito.

Crucial round 11 pairings (open section)

Bo. No. Name Pts. Result Pts. Name No.
1 3 GM Zhou Jianchao 7 7½ GM Ganguly Surya Shekhar 5
2 28 GM Antonio Rogelio Jr 7 7½ GM Zhou Weiqi 14
3 7 GM Negi Parimarjan 6½ 7 GM Hou Yifan 9
4 16 GM Sandipan Chanda 6½ 7 GM Yu Shaoteng 33
5 30 GM Kunte Abhijit 6½ 7 Yu Yangyi 54
6 2 GM So Wesley 6½ 6½ GM Le Quang Liem 8
7 1 GM Sasikiran Krishnan 6 6½ GM Torre Eugenio 15
8 26 GM Rahman Ziaur 6 6 GM Kazhgaleyev Murtas 4
9 24 GM Moradiabadi Elshan 6 6 GM Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son 10
10 12 GM Filippov Anton 6 6 GM Deepan Chakkravarthy J 38
11 47 Ding Liren 6 6 GM Gupta Abhijeet 13
12 17 GM Li Shilong 6 6 IM Toufighi Homayoon 42
13 20 GM Dao Thien Hai 6 6 Wan Yunguo 53
14 36 GM Iuldachev Saidali 5½ 5½ GM Ghaem Maghami Ehsan 6
15 79 Pak Evgeniy 5½ 5½ GM Al-Modiahki Mohamad 11
16 34 Gao Rui 5½ 5½ GM Murshed Niaz 65
17 37 IM Al Sayed Moh Mad N 5½ 5½ GM Mahjoob Morteza 35

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