Olga Prudnykova is the Icelandic champion in chess, after she won at the Icelandic Women’s Championship yesterday and in doing so she beat the reigning chess queen Lenka Ptácníkova, who has been the strongest female chess player in Iceland for years.
A record-breaking attendance will be at the Reykjavík Open, which begins in Harpa on Wednesday and lasts for two weeks until April 4. Participants include 34 Grandmasters, including Russian chess legend Vassily Ivanchuk, who has the highest ELO score of the participants in the tournament.
The first two rounds of mini-matches at the World Fischer Random Championship were played on Tuesday in Reykjavik. Nodirbek Abdusattorov (group A) and Hikaru Nakamura (group B) won both their mini-matches to take early leads. Nakamura defeated Magnus Carlsen in their direct matchup. The world champion had a faulty performance, as he blundered material both against Nakamura and Vladimir Fedoseev. | Photo: FIDE / David Llada
Many of the world’s best chess players compete in the World Fischer Random Chess Tournament, which begins at the Hotel Natura in Reykjavík tomorrow in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the duel between the grandmasters Fischer and Spassky. About forty volunteers are working at the event, which will be open to the public.
Fischer leads by three points. The Match of the Century was coming to a head, with Spassky, despite all his efforts, unable to reduce the deficit. "I felt that Fischer was like a large fish in my hands," he lamented, "one that was slippery and hard to hold on to. At certain moments I let him slip. And then again the psychological torment would begin. Everything had to be begun again from the start ." Spassky was beginning to feel despondent. | Photo: Skáksamband Íslands