IM Max Illingworth's visit to Baku for the 2015 World Cup has ended quickly, eliminated by GM Pentala Harikrishna in the first round. Although the game went past 70 moves, Illingworth was on the backfoot from move 15, where an exchange sacrifice didn't give him enough play. Harikrishna neutralised any threats and
nursed his advantage all the way to a 2-0 victory. the game ended in a draw. The match score of 1.5-0.5 put Harikrishna through to the second round
While the round is still in progress, top seed Veselin Topalov has gone through to the second round with a 2-0 win. He has been joined by Svidler, Aronian and Caruana (amongst others), while a few high profile day 1 losers (including Wang Hao and Moiseenko) bounced back to tie the match with day 2 wins.
(** Update: At the time of the original posting the live coverage had the result as a win for Harikrishna, although I note that this has now changed)
2 comments:
A strange post - Illingworth drew the second game easily.
I too was surprised to see the 1:0 result come up live, and figured that after however many moves of shuffling, Illingworth had a plane to catch, and so simply resigned.
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