{"id":2364,"date":"2013-08-13T13:39:54","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T21:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2364"},"modified":"2013-08-13T13:40:19","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T21:40:19","slug":"world-cup-round-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=2364","title":{"rendered":"World Cup Day 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

As expected, the playoff day for Round 1 of the World Cup was full of drama, with unbelievable reversals of fortune, controversy, and yes, two Armageddon games.<\/p>\n

The most unbelievable shift of fortune occurred in the match between #27 Evgeny Alekseev and #102 Baskaran Adhiban. According to the broadcast team of Susan Polgar and Lawrence Trent, the Russian’s flag fell in a position where he had mate-in-three! When I play over the game it doesn’t look quite that extreme, but it looks as if Alekseev could have easily queened a pawn and had mate in a few moves.<\/p>\n

By the time his flag fell, I think Alekseev was still winning but it was not so easy. I think he had to play for a zugzwang, which is a very tricky thing to work out when you have only 3 seconds per move. Maybe while he was doing these computations, he “froze” long enough for his flag to fall. In any case, he was a beaten man in the next game, which Adhiban also won to complete a shocking upset.<\/p>\n

The controversy came in the match between #20 Teimour Radjabov and #109 Jorge Cori. In one of the rounds Cori was not certain of the starting time — he thought it was xx:50 when in fact it was xx:15. When he saw the players heading back into the tournament hall on a TV feed, he rushed back to the playing hall, but he was one minute late<\/em> (or perhaps two, depending on whose account you read). According to FIDE’s ridiculous “zero tolerance rule,” this meant that he was forfeited. He filed an appeal with a required fee of $500, which Susan Polgar offered to pay for him. (I’m not sure whether she actually did or not.) Nice gesture, Susan, but you have a little bit to learn about so-called journalistic objectivity. The appeals committee’s decision was swift and merciless. Because Cori did manage to draw his next game, the forfeit ended up costing him the match.<\/p>\n

It’s very sad, but there is no one to blame here except the FIDE leadership, which implemented the stupid rule. It’s not Radjabov’s fault, not the appeals committee’s fault (they are charged with enforcing the rules, nothing more) and especially not Cori’s fault. But the result is that we were all deprived of what might have been the biggest upset of round 1.<\/p>\n

The Armageddon games were Tomashevsky-Ramirez and Melkumyan-Granda Zuniga. In each case the higher-rated player (Tomashevsky and Granda Zuniga) won. I unfortunately could not watch because I was, get this, recording a ChessLecture! It’s a regular recording time for me, and I didn’t want to mess around with the schedule. So I can’t tell you much about what happened, but I’m sure it was exciting.<\/p>\n

So round one is history and the field for round two is set. How did my predictions do? In a word, pretty badly. I did only one thing right — I correctly predicted the number of upsets (14). Unfortunately, I did not predict the right<\/em> upsets. Here are the underdogs who won in the first round, with the four whom I predicted in boldface:<\/p>\n