Seven players remain with a perfect score after an exciting third round at the Reykjavik Open / European Individual Championship.
On the top board, locals had their eyes on the clash between Iceland #1 and German #1 as Hjorvar Steinn Gretarsson (2603) battled with Matthias Bluebaum (2674).
A draw was agreed after a dynamic battle
On the 2nd board, Keymer took some chances early and that seemed to backfire. He got into timetrouble and blundered.
Vincent Keymer blundered here with Qd2. How did Sarana take advantage of it? #ReykjavikOpen #EICC #Chesd #Tactics pic.twitter.com/WcdcFhC1Gh
— ReykjavikOpenChess (@ReykjavikOpen) August 28, 2021
Thus Alexey Sarana (2643) was one of the first players to get to 3 out of 3.
Niclas Huscenbeth went into the Dubov lab in the Italian with the inventive b4!? An interesting fighting battle ensued vs crafty Italian Daniele Vocaturo. After some tactics Huscenbeth got a nice ending with the bishop pair and converted, entertaining game!
After a game that seemed to hang in the balance for most of it, Robert Hovhannisyan grabbed his chances with a surprising king walk in the endgame!
Another heavyweight battle was the game between Fridman and Gabuzyan. This was a real blow for blow game, full of tactics and dynamics. Fridman seemed to get the better out of the opening but then it became a full on fist fight where the Armenian came out on top.
The most impressive sequence of the day might however have been in the game between Rasmus Svane and Velimir Ivic. The sequence starting with 29…Ng5! was very interesting and turned out to be almost impossible to defend by white in a practical game.
Finally Mikhail Antipov willed his way to a win and joined the full-house party.
Malcolm Pein felt the pain at the end of his game….
Got to love the @ReykjavikOpen tremendously strong opponents and they even have #MOTD on the telly Played interesting novelty today and missed an instructive draw at the end in haste Thanks to @LucasvanForeest for really interesting game #EICC Black to play pic.twitter.com/lA1gqt7y0x
— Malcolm Pein (@TelegraphChess) August 28, 2021
3rd round commentary replay with Ivan Sokolov and various guest commentators, this time FM Ingvar Thor Johannesson (aka Zibbit on Youtube)
Results
Fourth round pairings took longer than usual as a player came to the organizers after his game in the 3rd round and reported having some symptoms of illness. The player in question will undergo a PCR test tomorrow morning and will not be paired for the 4th round
