Kosteniuk gets Gold on 1st Board in Eilat ChessEuro Cup ahead of Hou Yifan

The European Chess Club Cup just ended in Eilat, Israel. In the women’s section, the Monaco team won, and in the men’s section, the Azerbaijan team won. Besides team medals, the most sought after Gold medal was the 1st Board top result, and it was obtained by Chess Queen™ Alexandra Kosteniuk, with a result of 4.5/6 and a higher performance than current women’s world chess champion Hou Yifan, whom she beat in the very first round of the event (in a surprise Caro-Kann, replay the game here). Alexandra won 11 Elo points in this event (+60 Elo points so far this year), and will be back above 2500 on the November 1 rating list, which will be right before the women’s world championship, in which the best women chess players of the planet will take part. New: more photos at the bottom of the post.




Three world champions played on the 1st board, the 13th world champion Hou Yifan, the 12th Alexandra Kosteniuk, and the 10th Antoaneta Stefanova. Here are the results:










A photo taken right before the game Hou Yifan – Alexandra Kosteniuk (0-1):







The top three on the first board, Gold: Alexandra Kosteniuk, Silver: Hou Yifan, Bronze: Elina Danielian.










On my free day I went to the very nice Oceanarium, took a lot of photos, and also enjoyed the exhibits. Here is a photo of me as a turtle. By the way, I post lots of photos on my Instagram (free iPhone or Android app) account “chessqueen”, feel free to follow me there.







One more photo of me, this time coming out of an egg (also posted on my Instagram account “chessqueen”):







If you’re not afraid of seeing a few cyrillic (= Russian) characters here and there, you can follow my Russian Twitter account @kosteniuk where I post more photos still. Here is a last photo of me in a dangerous “position”:







Thanks also to my team-mates Valentina Gunina, Ekaterina Kovalevskaya, Alina Kashlinskaya and Anastasia Savina, and team captain Eldar Mukhametov, we had a great time in Eilat, Israel!







And to close, my favorite diagram, the final position of my game against 13th world champion Hou Yifan, after I played 59…Ne4! See the game Hou Yifan – Alexandra Kosteniuk 0-1 in a Chess King applet.







Tags: Alexandra Kosteniuk, eilat chess, European Club Cup, Hou Yifan
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