21.12.2005 Second round summary

Konstantin Sakaev

The second round turned out to be a day of defending unpleasant positions. There was a feeling that long maneuvering struggle in the game Dreev-Tomashevsky play into White's hands - lack of long and complicated variations obviously suited Alexey, who must be tired after Khanty Mansiysk. In this situation his deep positional understanding could tell. Nevertheless, Evgeny was up tp the task, holding a slightly inferior position.

Sergey Rublevsky also defended well. He held quite an unpleasant endgame against Morozevich very confidently. Dmitry Jakovenko went through even more suffering - he was passing the Bareev test for more than 50 moves. However, Bareev also failed to come out with anything more than half a point.

There were two games, in which blood was shed. Alexander Khalifman suffered a disappointing defeat at hand of Vadim Zvjaginsev, committing a bad time scramble mistake (see the annonations to the game), and the highlight of the day was the game Kramnik-Volkov, in which Vladimir rehabilitated brilliantly for his yesterday's unintelligible loss by conducting the game all in one breath.

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