Rasulov Wins Competitive Titled Tuesday
With several past winners, like Hikaru Nakamura competing in the Skilling Open this week, there was an opportunity for a new winner of Titled Tuesday. Azerbaijani Vugar Rasulov stepped up and picked up first prize with 9.5/11, edging out GM Aryan Tari of Norway and GM Giga Quparadze of Georgia on tiebreaks. The tournament, an 11-round Swiss with a 3+1 time control, had a total of 704 participants.
Rasulov recovered from a third-round loss against Turkish GM Mert Erdoğdu by winning the next six games in a row. Here's his round 10 game against Russian GM Pavel Ponkratov.
The top seed of the event was GM Jose Eduardo Martinez Alcantara, and he went undefeated but finished a half-point out of first. He probably regrets his first-round draw to a significantly lower rated opponent, but the FM with the handle Gerodot71 played well and nearly took the full point.
Alcantara was still in the running heading into the final round, but Rasulov held a quick draw with Black to secure at least a tie for first place. Tari earned his tie 2nd place finish with an exciting final round game against former world title challenger GM Gata Kamsky.
Quparadze secured his spot on the podium by winning a dramatic final round game against the American GM Conrad Holt. Holt won a piece right out of the opening, but Quparadze kept finding ways to complicate the game and found a way to make his pawns more valuable than White's extra knight!
November 24 Titled Tuesday | Final Standings (8.5 points and up)
| Place | Fed | Title | Username | Name | Score | SB | Prize |
| 1 | GM | vugarrasulov | Vugar Rasulov | 9.5 | 65.5 | $750 | |
| 2 | GM | AryanTari | Aryan Tari | 9.5 | 60.25 | $400 | |
| 3 | GM | GigaQuparadze | Giga Quparadze | 9.5 | 55 | $150 | |
| 4 | GM | BocharovD | Dmitriy Bocharov | 9 | 67.5 | $100 | |
| 5 | NM | Sviridov_Valery | Валерий Свиридов | 9 | 58 | ||
| 6 | GM | Jospem | Jose Eduardo Martinez Alcantara | 9 | 56.75 | ||
| 7 | GM | champ2005 | Raunak Sadhwani | 9 | 54.75 | ||
| 8 | GM | Smirnov_Pavel | Pavel Smirnov | 9 | 54.5 | ||
| 9 | GM | Shield12 | Shamsiddin Vokhidov | 9 | 53.75 | ||
| 10 | NLD | IM | LiamVrolijk | Liam Vrolijk | 9 | 53.25 | |
| 11 | GM | BogdanDeac | Bogdan Daniel Deac | 9 | 52.5 | ||
| 12 | FM | esapunov | Evgeny Sapunov | 9 | 49 | ||
| 13 | GM | AlexeiShirov | Alexei Shirov | 8.5 | 54.75 | ||
| 14 | GM | RD4ever | Rustam Khusnutdinov | 8.5 | 53.75 | ||
| 15 | GM | Grandelicious | Nils Grandelius | 8.5 | 52 | ||
| 16 | GM | dretch | Conrad Holt | 8.5 | 51.5 | ||
| 17 | GM | TigrVShlyape | Gata Kamsky | 8.5 | 47.5 | ||
| 18 | IM | Alexander_Kachko | Alexander Kachko | 8.5 | 44.25 | ||
| 60 | GM | ChessQueen | Alexandra Kosteniuk | 7.5 | 29.75 | $100.00 | |
| 203 | WGM | Nemsko | Nemo Zhou | 5.5 | 24.75 | $100.00 |
GM Alexandra Kosteniuk took the prize for the female finisher and Nemo Zhou took the prize for the top streamer.
Titled Tuesday is Chess.com's weekly tournament for titled players. It starts each Tuesday at 10 a.m. Pacific time (19:00 Central Europe) with a weekly prize fund of $1,600.
Jeremy Kane is a National Master and three-time Wisconsin state champion. He is the Director of Training Content for Chess.com. He has been teaching chess in person and online for over 15 years and has designed hundreds of lessons, available on chess.com/lessons. He is the author of Starting Out The Trompowsky on Chessable and The Next To Last Mistake, a book on defensive ideas in chess.
He is the developer of the Caro-Kane Variation of the Caro-Kann Defense.
email: [email protected]
Twitter/X: @chessmensch
