Gaziantep: Sebag lead alone with a perfect score

The European Individual Women Chess Championships are being held from 2 to 13 March, 2012, in the Anatolian Hotel in Gaziantep, Turkey. The event will be followed by the European Rapid Championship and European Blitz Championship (15-18 of March). The EIWCC consists of eleven games. The rate of is 90 minutes for 40 moves plus 30 minutes for the rest of the game with an increment of 30 seconds per move, starting from move one. Games start at 16:00h local time.

Organizers and prize fund: The Turkish Chess Federation, with the sponsorship and support of the Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality, under the auspices of the City of Gaziantep and the European Chess Union, provided a prize fund of 150,000 Euro for all three events. This is the biggest prize fund in the history of European Women's Chess events. For the first time in the chess history the European Women's Champion will get a higher prize sum, 20,500 Euros, than the Champion of the (Open or "Men's") European Individual Championship, which will be held in Plovdiv after this event.

Round four

Cristina-Adela Foisor (left) drew her game against Antoaneta Stefanova...

... , which meant the French GM Marie Sebag took the sold lead after four rounds

Valentina Gunina, Nastassia Ziazulkina, Nino Khurtsidze, Thanh Trang Hoang, Zoya Schlening managed to win. They share the second place, half a point behind of Sebag. Turkish player Betul Yildiz and Armenian Elina Danielian played an attention-grabbing game. After an interesting theoretical battle in the French Defence Betul managed to convert to a winning ending, but didn't play precisely and almost lost the game.

Ukrainian GM Katerina Lahno, 2546, vs Russian WGM Russian Alina Kashlinskaya,
2377, with Russian IM Valentina Gunina, 2511, looking on. The game was drawn.

Bulgarian WIM Nastassia Ziaziukina, 2343, ground down IM Almira Skripchenko of
France, rated 2468, in a tough 72-move game

• Full results of round four

Top standings after four rounds

• Full results with all 103 players here

All photos by WGM Anastasiya Karlovich, with kind permission of the TCF

Links Official tournament site Games in PGN: R01, R02, R03, R04, All. The game file is non-standard (e.g. everything in CAPS) and will be cleaned up at the end of the event. The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

Copyright ChessBase