The first round is still underway, but nothing unusual so far. The favourites mostly won while I’ll be interested to see if Giri wins the rook endgame 2 vs 1 on one wing against FM Ssegwanyi, rated 2357, from Uganda.

There have been a lot of predictions before the tournament, but until now it didn’t interest me much who might win it. But today while browsing the results I noticed that almost all the Chinese players won their games! Only two players lost – Zhou Jianchao against Andreikin and Ni Hua against Mareco, but they will be white tomorrow. So I would dare to predict a Chinese winner of the World Cup! After the Olympiad and the World Team Championship, perhaps it’s time for an individual triumph as well? Or are the Chinese primarily team winners? We shall see.

From what I managed to see, a few curiosities – Kramnik played the QGD to beat Deisy Cori, rated 2419, so I suppose we will never ever see him play something sharper; Grischuk couldn’t win with white against IM Atabayev (2428) and neither could Gelfand against IM Henriquez Villagra (2511). There were two Sveshnikov Sicilians, played by Yu Yangyi (who won against Iordachescu) and Grachev (who drew with Motylev) – is it time for a comeback?

On a sidenote, according to my statistics, I crossed the 100 000 views of my blog. Not bad, I hope I am providing good-quality content and the readers are happy with what they read.