The Championship of the National Student Chess League is held within the frames of the RSSU Cup, Moscow Open for the second time. On the contrary to the last edition this year the decision to clear players with any ranking position was taken. It noticeably made the tournament stronger. This year representatives of 12 countries participate in the tournament, including one grandmaster, two international masters and sixteen FIDE masters. The total number of the tournament participants is 125 chess players. The teams of 31 higher educational institutions of the country struggle for medals in the team event.
After four game days the sole leader appeared in the tournament: FIDE master Roman Kezin (Novosibirsk State University) with four victories in a row tops of the table. Ten participants with 0,5 points less are chasing the leader. FIDE masters Igor Vakhlamov (Moscow State University), Ivan Volodin (Perm State University), Mikhail Bryakin (Saratov State Academy of Law), Vasily Vasilyev (North-Eastern Federal University), Maksim Samusenko (Kazan State Power Engineering University) and Alexey Kamrukov (Novosibirsk State University) are among them.
Three female chess players with 2,5 points are showing the best result in the women’s tournament: Alfia Nasybullina (Ural State Mining University), Mari Vanishvili (South Ural State University) and Ludmila Leolko (Russian).
The team of the South Ural State University (Maxim Vaseptsov, Mari Vanishvili) with 6 points is leading in the team event. Two teams are half a point behind the leader – those are the teams of Saratov State Academy of Law (Mikhail Bryakin, Anastasia Aseeva) and the second team of the North-Eastern Federal University (Valisy Vasilyev, Ayyyna Egorova).
Seven teams scored 5 points, including such strong ones as the Ural State Mining University (Vitaliy Bernadskiy, Alfia Nasybullina), Russian State University of Physical Education, Sport, Youth and Tourism (Tagir Taalaibekov, Ludmila Leolko) and Kuban State Agrarian University (Maxim Lugovskoy, Natalia Pavlova).
The competitions are played in the Swiss system format in 9 rounds. The names of the winners will be announced on February 4.