Unive Hoogeveen: Nakamura wins with 2855 performance

The 16th Univé Chess Festival is taking place from the 19th to 27th of October 2012, in Hoogeveen, Holland. The main event is a four-player Crown Group double round robin with Hikaru Nakamura, USA, rated 2786, Anish Giri, NL, 2730, Sergey Tiviakov, NL, 2659, and women's world champion Hou Yifan, China, 2605. The average rating is 2695, making this a category 18 tournament. The Unive Open has 78 players and is a nine round event that started on October 19. The prize fund is € 7,500, with a first prize of € 3,000. The sponsor of the Univé Chess Festival is Univé.

Nakamura wins Crown Group – à la Kramnik

Hikaru Nakamura won the Univé Crown Group, with an impressive 4.5 out of 6 points and a 2848 performance. The American GM followed the same tournament strategy as last year's winner Vladimir Kramnik: three points with white, three draws with black. The reward: Nakamura cashed the first prize of 4000 Euros and rose by five precious Elo points in the international rating list. The latter probably counts for him as much as a first prize. A poor performance in the recent Grand Prix tournament in London took twenty points off Nakamura's standing, dropping him out of the global top ten. The five points from Hoogeveen are a a step in the right direction.

In the final round a draw would have been enough for victory, and under other circumstances Nakamura said that he would probably have not taken any risks. But after that disastrous tournament in London he really had to hunt for rating points. And so he delivered the best game in this year's Crown Group has delivered this year, composing a strategic masterpiece, without sacrifices or combinations, gradually pushing his opponent over the edge of the board. Tiviakov was quite unhappy with his role in this endeavor. He found that he had missed a draw at around move 20, committing serious mistakes that in the sequel proved irreparable.

Source: tournament web site

GMs Anish Giri and Yifan Hou played a correct draw to complete their modest tournament results. Although Hou ended with a 2.0/6 score in last place, she perhaps had more reason for satisfaction than Giri, who scored half a point more but hardly make a real impression in any of his games. However, he managed to keep his opponent under pressure in the white games, and if he had used a golden chance in round three against Tiviakov, he would have had an excellent tournament after all.

Final standings (after six rounds)

Of the 12 games in this tournament eight were drawn (= 66.7 percent), White won four games (33.3%) and Black none. Nakamura had 50% decided games, Giri just 17% (one loss in the first round). The players gained or shed up to nine points from this event, and with his performance Hikaru Nakamura reminded us that he is heading for the elite 2800 club. Note that in our table above and in the PGN download given at the bottom of the page we have used the October FIDE ratings. The official site appears to have taken theirs from the May 2012 ratings.

The photograpers crowd around the winner of the Crown Group

At the prize-giving: Nakamura, Tiviakov, Hou and Giri

All results of the Crown Group

Unive Open 2012

The final round of the open tournament was extremely exciting. Frizo Nijboer was on 7.0/8, a full point ahead of four Dutch GMs: Erwin L'Ami, Sipke Ernst, Robin van Kampen and Jan Timman, with 6.0/8 points each. Three of them drew their games after long battles: Robin van Kampen failed to beat Jan Timman, and Sipke Ernst saw an advantageous position against GM Sergey Kasparov from Byelorussia bogged down into a draw.

The fourth pursuer, Erwin L'Ami, produced an epic battle in which he finally ground down Nijboer with the black pieces. According to our tablebases the knight endgame was theoretically defensible, but not for a human in the final round of a long tournament, against a grimly determined follower. GM Karsten Müller will have to explain the endgame to us.

The knight endgame in Frizo Nijboer vs Erwin L'Ami reaches epic intensity, before...

... Erwin wins it and joins Frizo in first place

Erwin and Nijboer finished together in joint first place, followed by the quartet Van Kampen, Timman, Ernst and Bosboom. Here are the three critical games of the final round:

Final top rankings of the Unive Open 2012

• Full results of all 78 participants + all available games in zipped PGN

Erwin L'Ami gets his prize for first place in the Unive Open

Links Official tournament site All games of the Crown Group in PGN 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.

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