When the organizers invited Nils Grandelius, who is busy at the youth world championship in Greece, I asked if I could play instead. Not quite an equal replacement, but no harm in asking, I thought. I was kindley invited. Here in Denmark I stay with Igor Teplyi in Århus, a real chess town with at least four GM:s and ten IM:s.

In the first round I was white against Nicolai Vesterbaek Pedersen. I noticed that he avoided the Catalan after most move orders, but not after the one I chose. Igor helped me with the preperation and guessed which line Nicolai was going to play, even though he had never played it before! I improved on current theory, got a nice position and won without much problems.

In the second round I faced Igor. He has just started to play 1.d4, so I thought it was clever to chose an unusual opening. In the end I went for the Accepted Queens Gambit for the first time in a serious game and got a playable position. Quite soon I had a accumulated a lot of positional advantages and must have been winning, but the best I could finally get was a position with queen against king - but where he is stalemated. You have to play exact to win, and I did apparently not.

This day it was a doubleround. Since I had played very badly in double rounds the last year I was saticficed with a draw against Vladimir Petkov, but after I had developed my pieces normally I got a promising position, so I decided to try for something. In an ending with two rooks against a queen, my general feeling is that I missed some good opportunities to win. Leko-Kramnik from the World Championship match 2004 is a good example of how you should play. Axel Smith, Skanderborg, October 18th, 2010