The Julius Baer Chess Tour brings together 20 of the world’s best male and female talented young players. The second tournament of the series, the Gelfand Challenge, started yesterday. After the first five rounds, Awonder Liang leads with a perfect score. Nodirbek Abdussatorov is currently in sole second place with 4 points. | Photo: Crystall Fuller
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Radjabov and So win first sets
The FTX Crypto Cup managed to gather the ten highest-rated players in the world, with the likes of Ding Liren (world number 3) and Levon Aronian (5) not even managing to make it into the knockout stage. Moreover, those who did reach the single elimination stage are faced with tough opponents from the get go most notably, Magnus Carlsen was paired up against Hikaru Nakamura while Fabiano Caruana is playing Ian Nepomniachtchi in the quarterfinals.
In the matches mentioned above, Carlsen and Caruana, the strongest players in the world according to rating, managed to save a draw in their first mini-matches by scoring wins on demand in their last games of the day. Meanwhile, Teimour Radjabov and Wesley So won their first sets against Anish Giri and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave respectively.
The preliminaries of the FTX Crypto Cup ended on Tuesday, with eight of the sixteen players qualifying to the quarterfinals. Fabiano Caruana was the top scorer in the round robin, while Magnus Carlsen only managed to qualify at the last minute, after defeating Teimour Radjabov on demand in the last round. Anish Giri, Hikaru Nakamura, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Wesley So, Teimour Radjabov and Ian Nepomniachtchi also made it through.
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