Atyrau Masters: Two Seeds Fall, Anand and Ahmad Lead on 3/3

The Atyrau Masters, the third stage of the Kazakhstan Chess Cup, lost its two highest-rated players within two rounds. Vietnamese GM Nguyen Duc Hoa (2405) beat top seed Shamsiddin Vokhidov (2649) in round one, and Armenian IM Sergey Sklokin-Bagiyan (2477) took down second seed Leon Luke Mendonca (2629) in round two. In both rounds the favourite lost to someone rated more than 150 Elo points lower.

How the seeds fell

Vokhidov’s loss came after he had done most of the hard work. He reached an objectively drawn opposite-coloured-bishops endgame with equal material, then made an error that let Nguyen win.

The rating gap was 244 points, which by the standard Elo curve means the favourite would normally be expected to score somewhere around 80 percent, so a loss is far from impossible but not common. Opposite-coloured bishops are famously drawish, which makes dropping the point from there all the more painful.

Mendonca’s game was a different kind of story. He had survived a clearly inferior middlegame and restored equality, only to badly misjudge a simplification. That allowed Sklokin-Bagiyan, playing White, to get a new queen by force.

Each seed lost only one game. Mendonca won his other two and is on 2/3, a point behind the leaders with six rounds to play. In a Swiss, a loss pushes a player down to lower boards for a while, so the way back to the top is a run of wins against the field below.

The leaders

Two players are perfect after three rounds: India’s Pranav Anand, the fourth seed (2606), and Azerbaijan’s Khagan Ahmad, the 18th seed (2524). Ahmad’s third-round win came against Sklokin-Bagiyan, so the man who beat Mendonca has now lost himself.

Thirteen players sit half a point back on 2.5/3. Among them are Arkadij Naiditsch (2580, playing for Bulgaria), Emin Ohanyan, Artiom Stribuk, Sergei Lobanov, Ivan Zemlyanskii and Bardiya Daneshvar. Several of the field’s lower-rated IMs are in that group too, including Lou Yiping, Shete Sammed Jaykumar and Aradhya Garg.

Behind them on 2 points are Mendonca, third seed Aditya Mittal (2621) and Gata Kamsky (2592), who now plays for France. Another name on 2 points is FM Yernur Yerzhanuly, whose rating is just 2109. Sklokin-Bagiyan is also on 2, with Vokhidov further down the list.

Format and prizes

The event runs from 12 to 20 October in Atyrau, a city at the mouth of the Ural River on the Caspian Sea, between Europe and Asia. Masters and Open sections both play nine rounds, at 90 minutes per game with a 30-second increment from move one. The final round is on Tuesday 20 October.

Draws cannot be offered before move 30, a rule aimed at discouraging quick agreed draws. Games are broadcast with a 15-minute delay as a fair-play measure. The combined prize fund is about US$100,000, and the Masters winner receives 9 million Kazakhstani tenge, roughly US$20,000.

Six rounds remain. With 109 players and a field that has already been scrambled, the leaders will soon meet stronger opposition, and the half-point chasing pack gives the top boards plenty of room to change.