Kashlinskaya Wins European Women's Chess Championship

IM Alina Kashlinskaya of Russia won the European Women's Championship in Antalya, Turkey. Kashlinskaya had the best tiebreak among a group of five players who all finished on 8/11.

The 20th European Individual Women's Chess Championship took place April 11-22 in the Aska Lara Resort & Spa Hotel in Antalya. It was a qualifier for the next FIDE Women's World Cup for the top 14 players. The prize fund was 60,000 euros with a first prize of 10,000 euros.

Like the general European Championship (won by Vladislav Artemiev last month in Skopje), the tournament was a long and big Swiss event that lasted 11 rounds. Eventually five players shared first place, and took home 6,500 euros each. IM Alina Kashlinskaya (Russia, 2477), GM Marie Sebag (France, 2461) and IM Elisabeth Paehtz (Germany, 2456) got on the podium, while IM Inna Gaponenko (Ukraine, 2428) and GM Antoaneta Stefanova (Bulgaria, 2464) just missed out.

The grapes were sour for the 42-year-old Gaponenko, who was closer than ever to not only score her first medal at a European individual, but also win it.

After 10 rounds the Ukrainian IM was the only player to have reached eight points, with Kashlinskaya and Sebag trailing by half a point. Gaponenko got involved in a highly tense game with Stefanova, in which both players were under 30 minutes after the 13th move. (That was also the moment when the first new move was played.)

It ended up as a dream Tarrasch French for Stefanova, who got to play against an isolated queen's pawn, then won that pawn and gained another one with a tactic. The queen ending with two extra pawns hardly required technique.

Earlier in the tournament, Gaponenko had beaten the eventual tournament winner. Incidentally, that was a Tarrasch French as well, with the Ukrainian behind the white pieces this time. In what seemed like a danger-free endgame, Kashlinskaya made some wrong choices early on:

That was Kashlinskaya's only loss. She bounced back in the penultimate round with a good win over a compatriot, IM Anastasia Bodnaruk. It started with a rather theoretical, queenless middlegame in the Gruenfeld, when Bodnaruk just gave up a pawn where it didn't seem necessary yet. After that, she was without a chance.

The silver medal went to GM Marie Sebag, one of the participants in our upcoming Women's Speed Chess Championship. Here's her win from the ninth round, which saw an exchange sacrifice that wasn't winning immediately but nonetheless hard to handle:

There was a nice twist to Paehtz's third place. After the tournament she wrote on Facebook that she had initially planned to play the Reykjavik Open instead, but her flight got cancelled due to the bankruptcy of Wow Air.

Paehtz: "A new ticket was quite expensive and I decided to take it as a sort of sign switching my plans and fight at the European Women's Championship. 8/11 unbeaten and 3rd. Well nothing to complain but proud to suffer one of the most common chess illnesses: Superstition!"

Of the five players who ended on eight points, Paehtz was the only one who remained undefeated. She reached the podium with the following last-round win over IM Ekaterina Atalik, the wife of Turkish grandmaster Suat Atalik:

So what happened to top seed GM Aleksandra Goryachkina? Well, she finished a point behind the top group, mostly because of the following loss in round eight:

Gold at the European Championship was another big success for Kashlinskaya, half a year after clinching the top women's prize at the 2018 Chess.com Isle of Man alongside her husband and the overall tournament winner, Radek Wojtaszek.

Below are the final standings with all players who finished on seven points or more.

2019 European Women's Championship | Final Standings (Top 25)

Games via TWIC.