Sarana defeats Korobov to grab the sole lead in EICC 2023

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GM Alex­ey Sarana (FIDE, 2668) defeat­ed GM Anton Korobov (UKR, 2658) in Round 9 to take the sole lead in the Euro­pean Indi­vid­ual Chess Cham­pi­onship 2023 with only two rounds to go.

Alex­ey Sarana got the upper hand in a dynam­ic posi­tion, which lat­er trans­posed into a pawn-up endgame for the 26-year-old grand­mas­ter. Korobov fought hard, but Sarana demon­strat­ed a per­fect tech­nique and scored a vic­to­ry to get clos­er to the EICC-2023 throne.

It was a draw in the clash of gen­er­a­tions which was played on the sec­ond board between 23-year-old GM Ben­jamin Gle­du­ra (HUN, 2637) (pic­tured below) and 54-year-old Boris Gelfand (ISR, 2674). Gle­du­ra had a slight­ly bet­ter posi­tion out of the open­ing and even­tu­al­ly emerged up a pawn. How­ev­er, it wasn’t enough to earn a full point, as Gelfand’s active pieces helped him to keep the posi­tion in balance.

Sit­ting on 7 points (each), GMs Anton Korobov (UKR, 2658), Eti­enne Bacrot (FRA, 2659), Ben­jamin Gle­du­ra (HUN, 2637), Kir­ill Shevchenko (ROU, 2668), Andrey Esipenko (FIDE, 2680), Valentin Drag­nev (AUT, 2561) and David Par­avyan (FIDE, 2584) are tied for the sec­ond place.

The 10th penul­ti­mate round starts tomor­row at 15:00 CEST with the clash between the two young­sters on the top board. Andrey Esipenko will have the white pieces against the new leader Alex­ey Sarana.

Round 10 top 10 pair­ings:

1. Esipenko, Andrey (7) – Sarana, Alex­ey (7½)
2. Shevchenko, Kir­ill (7) – Gle­du­ra, Ben­jamin (7)
3. Bacrot, Eti­enne (7) – Par­avyan, David (7)
4. Drag­nev, Valentin (7) – Korobov, Anton (7)
5. Anton, Gui­jar­ro David (6½) – Kadric, Denis (6½)
6. Ivic, Velimir (6½) – Pred­ke, Alexan­dr (6½)
7. Gelfand, Boris (6½) – Lupules­cu, Con­stan­tin (6½)
8. Grandelius, Nils (6½) – Azarov, Sergei (6½)
9. Iskan­darov, Mis­rat­din (6½) – San­tos Latasa, Jaime (6½)
10. Nguyen Thai Dai Van (6½) – Guliyev, Namig (6½)

Live broad­cast with com­men­taries by IM Mio­drag Perunovic can be fol­lowed through the ECU YouTube chan­nel.

Text and pho­tos: offi­cial website

Offi­cial web­site: eicc2023.com/

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