27 May 2011
Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2011
Hello everyone,
GM Paco Vallejo of Spain has won the first Bahia Feliz tournament on the Gran Canaria island, but not without some drama happening in the last round! He was undefeated for eight rounds but lost his last game with the white pieces. Just the right opportunity for the second-placed 14-year-old Grandmaster Ilya Nyzhnyk (Ukraine) to catch up. But the latter lost too. So Paco Vallejo won the tournament with a clear 6/9.
The first Bahia Feliz GM tournament was held May 12-21 in Gran Canaria, one of the Canary Islands (also known as ‘Canaries’ or Canarias in Spanish). The group of seven islands and six islets is located just off the north-west coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. Gran Canaria is the third largest, after Tenerife and Fuerteventura.
The tournament took place in the Hotel Orquidea of the Bahia Feliz resort, on the south coast of the island. It was a 10-player, single round robin with quite an interesting field of players: Francisco Vallejo Pons (Spain), Julio Granda Zuniga (Peru), Markus Ragger (Austria), Henrique Mecking (Brazil), Ilya Nyzhnyk (Ukraine), Gerald Hertneck (Germany), Stefan Bromberger (Germany), Stefan Kindermann (Germany), Ramon Mateo (Dominican Republic) and Sabrina Vega Gutierrez (Spain).
The tournament was sponsored by Roman Krulich, a chess player himself but also partner of the Munich Academy of Chess and the founder of the Munich Chess Foundation.
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