Azernews.Az

By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

Azerbaijani grandmaster Shakhriyar Mammadyarov has started the Altibox Norway Chess tournament with a victory.

In the first round, Mammadyarov won a victory over the second-rated chess player of the planet Fabiano Caruana (the U.S.) with the score 1.5:0.5.

The tournament, taking place in the Norwegian Stavanger, has rules uncommon for conventional chess tournaments.

If two players share the first place, there will be a two-game match with the same time control as in the blitz tournament: 3 min. + 2 sec. increment per move. If this match ends in a tie, there will be an Armageddon game where white has 5 minutes and black has 4 minutes with an increment of 3 seconds per move, starting from move 61 with draw odds.

If more than two players share the first place, there will be a double round-robin with the same tiebreak rules as the opening blitz tournament. The remaining players in this will share their money prizes.

All the main games of the first round of the Altibox Norway Chess tournament ended in a draw. Meanwhile, in Armageddon game, Magnus Carlsen (Norway) won Viswanathan Anand (India), Levon Aronian (Armenia) won Alexander Grischuk (Russia), Ding Liren (China) defeated Wesley So (the U.S.), and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France) lost to Yangyi Yu (China).

Altibox Norway Chess has in only a matter of a few years grown to be one of the world’s strongest chess tournaments. It has proven to be a world-class event that is host to 10 of the top chess players in the world, including the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.

This is one of the few chess tournaments in the world that are making a huge effort into commercializing chess in order to reach new audiences and to make it extremely attractive to sponsors.

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Mirsaid Ibrahimzade is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @MirsaidIbrahim1

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