A moment of your patience, bitte

It all looked so slick. Professional website, great list of sponsors, impressive list of participants... Still, this afternoon ten thousands of chess fans from all over the world had a feeling of disbelief and disappointment about the European Championship. About the absence of Mamedyarov and Ivanchuk I've already written, and most probably we cannot blame the Dresden organisers. (You can still spot Chucky and Mamy at several points on the website though.) No, what I'm talking about is of course the live games. Or better: their absence.

To start, you had to search for ages to even find the hyperlink, until total despair brought you the idea to have a look on the German language version of the site. There you'd find them immediately. Then you needed another smart concept to pop up in your brains: to click on the board number, when finally a chess board appeared on your screen. But the live games, they didn't work. I seem to recognize the free software LT-PGN-Viewer and in itself there's nothing wrong with open-source software (ChessVibes is 100% running on open-source) but with such a list of sponsors you cannot help but think: the 700 euros for the DGT software (the well-known blue screen) couldn't have been a big problem. And then, why not test the electronical boards before the tournament starts...

Well, while I'm writing this, the games can be followed smoothly by now, or so it seems. Startup problems, well, every tournament has to deal with them. Perhaps I was a bit too harsh about Dresden, but it needed to be said I guess.

Except for the fact that no. 1 seed Dmitry Jakovenko had a narrow escape (35.Re1 seems close to winning) against Jens Uwe Maiwald, we can name the first few surprises of round 1: Ralf Akesson managed to draw against Sergei Karjakin (perhaps in the Corus press room I shouldn't have explained the Ukrainian the concept of the Swiss Gambit), Rene Stern did the same against Zoltan Almasi, like Logman Guliev against Baduur Jobava and Cyril Marzolo against Corus A player Alexander Motylev. Kiril Georgiev even lost, against Frank Holzke and the same happened to FIDE official Zurab Azmaiparashvili, how also lost the surname contest against Krisztian Szabo. More later on, of course.

Update 22.39 CET: more upsets include Arkadij Naiditsch losing to Klaudiusz Urban, Florian Handke beating Vugar Gashimov, Esen Baris beating Bartosz Socko and Andrey Orlov beating Karen Asrian. By the way check Peter Sowray's notes on the arrival. The whole thing does sound like an Olympiad, which will be hosted in Dresden in a year from now.