On Saturday, October, 10^th, the 2015 FIDE World Chess Rapid and Blitz Championship began in Berlin. The playing hall „Bolle Meierei“ is situated next to the German department of the interior and the river Spree. Participants from all over the world took part in this prestigious event. In the rapid tournament 15 rounds Swiss system had to be played on three consecutive days. The players got 15 minutes for the whole game plus an increment of 10 seconds per move.

On Saturday the first five rounds were played. Sergey Karjakin who had won the World Cup just one week before presented himself in top form. He won his first three games against Jure Borisek, Grzegorz Gajewski and Anton Korobov. Only Yuriy Kryvoruchko managed to reach a draw against him. In the fifth round Karjakin defeated the German grandmaster Georg Meier and took the sole lead with 4,5 out of 5 ahead of 16 players with 4 points each, amongst them Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomniachtchi. Carlsen had won three of his five games. Ehsam Ghaem Maghami, a grandmaster from Iran, surprisingly drew against Carlsen in round 1, and so did Yuriy Kryvoruchko in round 5. At the end of the day 16 players had reached 3,5 out of 5, one of them being former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik.

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Round 7



Round 8



Round 9



Round 10



Round 11

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By GM Mauricio Flores Rios, Chile
Best rating: 2537

It’s been a while since I finished writing Chess Structures, but I like the topic so much that I keep coming back to it – I know how much it improved my understanding of chess. I follow games on Chessbomb pretty much daily and I really enjoy it when I see a nice ‘structure-concept’ being applied. Often these games reproduce ideas shown in the book almost identically, while sometimes there are small (yet very important!) differences. So I thought, why not start a blog in which I will, once in a while, post a game which builds upon the ideas I shared with the readers of my book. The permanent location of my blog is chess-structures.com.

Now let’s get started with some chess. As you may have realized, almost every game in my book was decisive (that is, not a draw) since drawn games (especially agreed draws) are like an unfinished story, and people just don’t like to read stories without an ending… Anyway, the only exception to this rule was Onischuk – Dominguez from the World Cup of 2013. This game was a Carlsbad structure (Chapter 5) which I thought was very instructive, as it shows how Black might completely neutralize White’s queenside plans. As I was following the Women’s World Championship in Sochi, I found a great example which pretty much takes off where Dominguez left off, and brings home the full point. The contenders: young star Guo Qi from China was White against World finalist Natalia Pogonina. Let’s see the game:

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May 15, 2015　　　　　　　　　　　

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Natalia Pogonina,

the Vice Women's World Chess Champion, becomes

the official ambassador of "CHESS HEROZ”.

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Tokyo (HEROZ, Inc.) – HEROZ, Inc. (“HEROZ”), providing mobile applications with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Natalia Pogonina (“Natalia”), who is the Vice Women’s World Chess Champion, have mutually agreed to popularize Chess through a mobile app, “CHESS HEROZ”. From here on, Natalia Pogonina will be the official partner of HEROZ.

Natalia is a chess grandmaster and one of the best female chess players in the world. Since 2004 she has been a member of Team Russia and is the reigning Olympic Women's Chess Champion.

AI x mobile as the key concept, HEROZ takes on the challenge in the world stage, providing mobile applications with AI function such as Shogi Wars (Japanese Chess app) and other new apps in various fields. CHESS HEROZ is one new app released in 2014 with the world-class AI function, allowing online match-ups all around the world. Thanks to all chess players, fans and users, CHESS HEROZ has been featured in more than 50 countries, including Russia, US, UK, Germany and India etc, at the Google Play Store and at the App Store.

HEROZ has been impressed by Natalia’s charm, wisdom and fighting spirit. She does her best to excel in every chess tournament and to share with people all over the world the joy of playing the game. Natalia, at the same time, also appreciates HEROZ’s concept and way of thinking, which is how the agreement has come into effect.

From here on, Natalia will support CHESS HEROZ activities as the official ambassador. She will be online in CHESS HEROZ and look forward to playing with you. Some activities featuring Natalia will be announced in advance so that you can actually challenge her or see her in the app.

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