Esipenko Leads Selfoss To 1st Nordic Club Cup Victory
SSON, the chess club from Selfoss, Iceland, won the first Nordic Internet Club Cup, played over the Easter Weekend on Chess.com. Vikingaklubburinn, also from Iceland, came second, ahead of Oslo (Norway).
The top seed in the inaugural Nordic Internet Club Cup was the A team of Skakfelag Selfoss Og Nagrennis (SSON), and they lived up to the expectations.
SSON played with the three Russian grandmasters Andrey Esipenko, Anton Demchenko, and Mikhail Antipov along with IM Semyon Lomasov (also Russia), GM Bragi Thorfinnsson and IM Arnar Gunnarsson—similar to their team in the regular Icelandic Team Championship.
SSON finished first with 25/14, one point more than Vikingaklubburinn, also from Iceland. SSON was founded in 1989 in Selfoss, the town in southern Iceland where GM Bobby Fischer is buried.
The tournament was a Swiss consisting of seven double rounds, which saw teams play each other twice in each round. It was held from April 9-13 on the Chess.com server. The time control was 10 minutes plus a two-second increment.
SSON and Vikingaklubburinn faced each other in rounds nine and 10. Vikingaklubburinn won the first match 3.5-2.5, but then SSON took revenge with a 4.5-1.5 victory, in hindsight a difference that could be seen as the decisive point in the final standings.
On board one, Esipenko defeated GM Grzegorz Gajewski twice in an endgame. Here's the first, where White somehow got outplayed in a drawish looking bishop endgame:
An interesting game was played in the match between Oslo and Selfoss. Norway's famous coach and former member of the national football team GM Simen Agdestein defeated Demchenko in a King's Indian that involved a remarkable queen sacrifice.
What's also remarkable is that it was first played back in 1994, by a young GM Loek van Wely, against GM Boris Gulko!
1st Nordic Internet Club Cup | Final standings (Top 20)
| Rk. | SNo | Fed | Team | Rounds | + | = | - | TB1 | TB2 | TB3 |
| 1 | 1 | SSON A | 14 | 12 | 1 | 1 | 25 | 1057,5 | 61,0 | |
| 2 | 3 | Víkingaklúbburinn A | 14 | 11 | 2 | 1 | 24 | 959,5 | 57,5 | |
| 3 | 6 | OSS 1 | 14 | 10 | 1 | 3 | 21 | 932,0 | 58,0 | |
| 4 | 14 | Skákfélag Akureyrar | 14 | 10 | 1 | 3 | 21 | 750,0 | 50,5 | |
| 5 | 20 | SK1911-1 | 14 | 10 | 1 | 3 | 21 | 698,5 | 52,5 | |
| 6 | 4 | Wasa SK | 14 | 9 | 2 | 3 | 20 | 889,0 | 52,0 | |
| 7 | 9 | MatSK 1 | 14 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 20 | 775,5 | 51,0 | |
| 8 | 23 | Breiðablik, Bolungarvík og Reykjanes A | 14 | 10 | 0 | 4 | 20 | 764,5 | 52,0 | |
| 9 | 5 | Reykjavík Chess Club | 14 | 10 | 0 | 4 | 20 | 755,5 | 54,5 | |
| 10 | 7 | Skanderborg Skakklub | 14 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 19 | 970,0 | 56,5 | |
| 11 | 2 | Huginn | 14 | 9 | 1 | 4 | 19 | 842,5 | 54,0 | |
| 12 | 49 | OSS Youth 1 | 14 | 8 | 3 | 3 | 19 | 592,5 | 49,0 | |
| 13 | 10 | VammSK | 14 | 9 | 0 | 5 | 18 | 831,0 | 54,0 | |
| 14 | 13 | JyS A | 14 | 9 | 0 | 5 | 18 | 746,0 | 51,5 | |
| 15 | 17 | Taflfélag Garðabæjar (TGchess) | 14 | 8 | 2 | 4 | 18 | 715,0 | 48,0 | |
| 16 | 8 | Jetsmark Skakklub | 14 | 8 | 1 | 5 | 17 | 740,5 | 48,0 | |
| 17 | 19 | OSS seniorer | 14 | 8 | 1 | 5 | 17 | 665,0 | 48,0 | |
| 18 | 21 | TuTS | 14 | 8 | 1 | 5 | 17 | 661,5 | 49,5 | |
| 19 | 11 | Kymen Shakki 1 | 14 | 8 | 1 | 5 | 17 | 581,0 | 42,0 | |
| 20 | 27 | Sandavágs Talvfelag | 14 | 8 | 1 | 5 | 17 | 557,5 | 50,0 |
(Full final standings here.)
The Nordic Internet Club Cup was an online competition for Nordic chess clubs organized by the Icelandic Chess Federation. 67 club teams from Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden played, with a total of 610 players, including 27 grandmasters.
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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