Favourites keep winning in round three

 

All top matches were decided yesterday, which means that we have now 5 teams with perfect score. NAO won another difficult match, this time against Polonia, thanks to the third consecutive win of Karjakin and Lautier, so both of them have 100%. Kramnik appeared for the first time in their team and made a draw against Gelfand. Russian teams Ural, Tomsk and Ladya Kazan won with identical result (4-2), so the first two of them are still leading on individual points.The only win of a lower rated team was achieved by I & A team from Tbilisi on table number four. Their top player Azmaiparashvili appeared for the first time and scored a decisive victory. Today NAO will begin to meet Russian teams, so the match of the day will be NAO - Tomsk-400.

The Italian team had a very good pairing but after a poor play lost convincingly. The honour was saved by the current national champion Fabio Bruno.

In the women's tournament the Russian team Platina, only number 9 upon start, won with minimal result against MTK Budapest, but it was enough to become a sole leader at least for 24 hours. Today they meet AVS and that will be their exam of maturity.

 

Problems with realtime coverage

 

As you unfortunately have experimented yourselves, yesterday has been a very bad day for realtime coverage of the round. We are very sorry that so many chess enthusiasts, both in the tournament hall and on the Internet, could follow their champions with such trouble and we apologyze with everybody.

We are keen on clarifying that the fault was never on the website, which works perfectly under a huge number of daily contacts and is being constantly improved by our designers, who have spent a lot of working time on it (we are very proud of them and of their results!).

The problem lies in the very heavy communication traffic generated inside the tournament building, before reaching the outer world, where the website resides. Signs of this are your (and our!) problems in accessing the Internet from the Palais, and the fact that we even had to turn off the big displays in the tournament hall, since both these activities add a good share of communication load. We are working to add more bandwidth in order to meet these needs, meanwhile please hold patience and forgive us for the inconveniences.