You can find on http://www.echecs-photos.be/FestivalBruxelles2008/index.html a summary of the last Brussels Chess Festival that was played in Brussels May 24-25th 2008.
The tournament was in rapid play : 25′-25′ for 11 games in two day.
The tournament was hosted by a nice Peugeot Garage in Brussels, named Peugeot-Declercq.
The others sponsors were “La maison blanche” (http://www.lamaisonblanche.org/en/) where the best players stayed and The french federation of chess in Belgium (FEFB).
The organisator was The Royal Chess Club from Brussels (named CREB, http://www.creb.be/), a club born in 1891 and in the center of Brussels (not far form the south train station).
There were 106 players with 5 IGM and more than 15 others players with a title (IGM, IM, WGM, FM…).
The strongest players were IGM Predrag Nikolic (2665) and Sergey Tiviakov (2649).
For Nikolic, this was his second participation. He was only 12th last year (see http://www.echecsphotos.be/FestivalBruxelles2007/index.html) when IGM Ivan Sokolov was the winner.
Tiviakov is the recent european champion but tired because he was just back from thelast Capablanca Memorial in La Havana, just a few days before.
The were 3,200 euros of prizes, with 600 euros for the first but many prizes for different categories.
The prizes were not so good that last year but the organisation was always perfect.
The Peugeot’s garage was a very nice place and their employee presented a nice buffet for playerswith a lot of kind of food and drinks.
The top seed, IGM Nikolic, won the tournament with an impressive score of 9.5/11 (see full results on http://www.echecs-photos.be/FestivalBruxelles2008/Classement/6i%E8me%20Festival%20International%20de%20Bruxelles.html)
He lost only on the third round against WGM Kadimova Ilaha (2326) and drew against IGM Popovic Petar (2480) in the last round.
For IGM Tiviakov, things were not so smooth. He lost against Ivan Spanoghe (2164) in the second round, drew against a young Belgian talent named Tanguy Ringoir (2252, 14 year) and lost against his rival Nikolic in the 10th round to finish only on the fifth place.
On saturday evening some players and the team of the organisation were on a very nice restaurant in Brusselsnamed “EGO”. This is also a specificity of this tournament and everybody was very enjoyed.
Hope that the next Festival in Brussels will be in the same place with the same organisation’s team!
Special thanks to Fabrice Wantiez for this report.
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I think Tiviakov is the busiest GM in the world.