The “Karabagh-2005” second annual international chess tournament kicked off on October the 1st. Twenty professional chess players participated in the tournament, including players from Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Spain, China, Russia and Armenia. In addition, the 17th and 11th place tournaments are also taking place (10 chess players in each tournament) at the same time. There are so many famous grostmeisters and chess players, such as international grostmeister Vasili Ivanchuk, Ivan Sokolov, Aleksey Dreyev, Victor Bologan, Khikaru Nakamura, Bartlome Macheyan, Yevgeni Sveshnikov and others. Honorable guest, grostmeister Layosh Portish was invited to Artsakh to be present at the tournament.
The first tournament took place in March 2004 and there were ten professional chess players participating. During the tournament, the honorable guest was 10th chess champion in the world Boris Spasski, and the champion from Armenia was international grostmeister Karen Asryan.
As we all know, Karabagh’s neighboring country Azerbaijan had tried to stop this year’s chess tournament from taking place. Famous grostmeister Yevgeni Sveshnikov considers that as a wrong move and states that “sports must serve as a means of solving any conflict in the region”. He also added that during the last tournament, the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan had sent a protest letter to the Chess Association of Latvia and Latvia had replied that it could not simply forbid its chess players from taking part in any individual tournament. During our interview with Yevgeni Sveshnikov, he stated that he would welcome the Azeri chess players to participate in the tournament taking place in Karabagh. The tournament will end on October 11. According to the third round results, the winner of the “A” (17th place) group are Ashot Anastasyan (Armenia) and Bu Ksangzhin (China). They each have 2.5 points. As for the “B” (11th place) group, there is one winner with 2.5 points-Armenian chess player representing Russia, international grostmeister Sergey Grigoryan.