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Ilya Shikshin won European Championship, Ondřej Šilt is sixth

A big surprise was there at the European Championship in Villach. The European Master is unexpectedly seventeen years old Ilya Shiksin from Russian who got ahead the biggest favourite sixfold European Master Alexander Dinershteyn only by two SOSOS. He had to acquiesce the second place for the second time. The last year Shikshin’s sister Svetlana was the first one. Shikshin also became the youngest European Master ever.

Our best placed representative was Ondřej Šilt – among Europeans the sixth one. He repeated the best result of our players from the recent years (in 1999 and 2003 was the sixth Vladimír Daněk, in 2002 Radek Nechanický and in 2005 Ondřej Šilt). The sixth place seems to be somehow cursed for the Czech players. Vladimír Daněk ended the twelfth. It is a pity, because our guys were in the front most time. And although the cast of lots was not the worst in the last round, they did not manage to rupture the unlucky series.

In the overall list, that is with the Asiatics who did not fight for the title of the European Master, three Koreans ended at the first three places: Hong Seok-ui, Cho Seok-bin and Park Jong-wook. The latter was really unlucky, because due to his health problems he did not play the eighth and ninth round. He won the rest. The top of the score sheet follows:

Complete results can be found here.

The rest of the Czech players mostly did well. All of them together had score 122:75, which means efficiency of 62 %. Eighth points out of ten had Tomáš Koželek, Petr Baudiš and Petr Zelina, seven out of ten Martin Klemsa, Vladimír Bíňovec and Ondřej Jurásek.

Together 573 players took part in the main tournament at the Championship which ranked the Championship in Villach to the third place in historic tables. More information can be found on the pages of the Championship here. The official photo gallery is on the pages of Martin Chrz.