I blogged about this chess tournament from Sofia a while ago. Then it was just at the beginning and Dieter Nisipeanu was not doing bad at all. Unfortunately Nisipeanu lost to Adams in round 3 and my prediction for him winning the tournament was really conditional on a win there :-).
The final results of the tournament are here, but there is for now a mistake on the official site; Sasikiran should be the one before last among them, not the second as displayed now (the order remains the same in the rest), probably the Bulgarians were too enthusiastic about Veselin Topalov’s win and ignored the rest of the hierarchy :-). I am sure they’ll correct tomorrow (I definitely trust more Susan Polgar’s ranking displayed on her blog, and it also corroborates my computation for the final standing; see also the interesting comments she made on the last round). Although he did not do overall as good as was expected of him, Topalov did very well towards the end of the tournament, finishing ranked first! In particular, remark that Topalov won in both games he played against Sasikiran, who really did a blunder in the last game against Topalov, until when he had been the leader of the tournament… The 4 players ranked below Topalov all have obtained 5 points, but given the rules of the game for tie-breaks, Nisipeanu is ranked 3rd among them and so 4th in the tournament… He could have done much better, but well, although he won to Topalov in the first game, he lost to him in the second and although he won to Adams in the second, he lost to the English GM in the first…
Update: In fact I was wrong (and most other people were wrong :-), including Susan Polgar above and these folks from hotnews.ro (in Romanian)- who usually don’t know what they write about, taking over without verification from other sources, not to mention that their interpretation is pathetic: “Nisipeanu finishes in the group from the second place”, instead of mentioning he was in the end 5th among 6 players…) and the organizers of the Mtel tournament were right. Given the rules from the tournament in Sofia, the second criteria is the number of wins. So indeed Sasikiran is number 2, with 3 wins, as Topalov (and Nisipeanu is 5th).
