7 June 2015
The 13th Meeting in Kirishi
GM Dmitry Kryakvin reports on Vanya Somov’s Memorial in Kirishi, Leningrad region.
While in Georgia and Khanty-Mansyisk are continuing battles of men and women's world championship qualifying cycle, those who only dream about the highest achievements gathered for Vanya Somov’s Memorial in Kirishi. The best Russian and foreign juniors already for the 13th time met at the tournament devoted to the memory of talented chess player, who died young.
Many past participants of the World’s Youth Stars became ingrained in the world chess elite. We can mention Sergey Karjakin, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Dmitry Andreikin, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Evgeny Alekseev, Ildar Khairullin, and younger players Vladislav Artemiev and Vladimir Fedoseev, who build a reserve pool of the national team. And let’s take a look at the participants of 2014: Olexandr Bortnyk became World U19 Champion, all his Elo ratings are growing like mad. Daniil Yuffa was second at the European U19 Championship, David Paravyan, Alexey Sarana, Saveliy Golubov and Andrey Esipenko are defeating strong GMs.
This year the guests of the tournament are the representatives of the Olympic National Youth teams: Abdulla Gadimbayli (AZE), Matyas Marek (CZE), Ariel Erenberg (ISR), Giorgi Sibashvili (GEO), Valeriy Kazakovskiy (BLR) and Thore Perske (GER). By the way, a nice young man from Germany with a Scandinavian name (Perske highlighted that his name is of Norwegian origin) was the best in the strong German team.
Russia is represented by winners of junior’s championships Kirill Kozionov, Andrey Esipenko, Semen Khanin, Maksim Chigaev, Alexey Zenzera and a local player Svetlana Tishova. Sveta has a difficult time in such a heavyweight company, but she fights back, it is not easy to defeat her. After five rounds there is a dense group of leaders, the main battle is ahead. We'll look through the chess details of the event in the final reports.
Gennady Efimovich Nesis, who was a coach of Vanya Somov, told me that organizers have tremendous future plans. Gennady Nesis has been elected the director of a new Youth European Grand Prix series by the Еuropean Сhess Union, where the strongest young players of the Old World would participate. The Grand Prix will contain several stages, one of them will be the World’s Youth Stars. This sounds very interesting, though details of the new project are not clear yet.
On the rest day was played the Nesis Cup – a blitz tournament devoted to the birthday of the organizer and chief arbiter of the competition. Invited GMs Evgeny Alekseev, Aleksandr Shimanov, Konstantin Sakaev, Ildar Khairullin and other prominent blitz experts from St. Petersburg joined the players and guests of the Memorial. Maksim Chigaev and Valeriy Kazakovskiy are leading at the main event, exactly now they are struggling for leadership against each other.
