VietNamNet Bridge – After four ties, Vietnam’s top chess player Le Quang Liem completed his first leg of competition at the Sparkassen Chess Meeting 2011, in Germany with a win over defending champion, Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov (world’s tenth player) on July 26 (Hanoi time).

Liem, with an Elo rating of 2,715 and ranking 27th in the world, struggled for over 6 hours with 71 moves to defeat his high-profile rival.

At the Sparkassen 2010, Liem had made a win and a draw with Ponomariov and finished second behind him.

Completing five games in the first leg of the tournament of six world-class grandmasters, Liem had three points to rank second on the list, after the world’s number 5, Wladimir Kramnik (world’s fifth player) of Russia with 4.5 points.

Ponomariv dove to the third place with 2 points. He is followed by Anish Giri of the Netherlands, 2 points; Georg Meier of Germany and Hikaru Nakamura of the US, with 1.5 points each.

The second leg of the tournament will kick off on July 27, with Liem vs Georg Meier, Ruslan Ponomariov - Wladimir Kramnik, Hikaru Nakamura - Anish Giri.

Liem’s goal at this tournament is entering the top three.

The Sparkassen Chess-Meeting takes place at Dortmund from July 21 through 31. It is an elite chess tournament held every summer in Dortmund, Germany.

Dortmund is an invite-only event, and only the strongest grandmasters are invited. The exception is that one slot at Dortmund is awarded to the winner of the annual Aeroflot Open in Moscow, a tournament that anyone with an Elo of at least 2550 is welcome to enter.

The tournament is usually played in a round-robin or double round-robin format.

At the last year’s Sparkassen, Vietnam’s Liem finished second after Ruslan Ponomariov of Ukraine and in the same year, became the first Southeast Asian to win the Aeroflot Open, the world's most difficult open chess event, twice in a row.

PV