Dominguez Wins Leon Masters
GM Leinier Dominguez won the Leon Chess Festival's Masters tournament by beating GM Jaime Santos 2.5-1.5 in the final on Sunday. On Monday, Dominguez will give a 25-board simul on Chess.com.
The games of the Leon Masters can be found here as part of our live events platform. The simul will start Monday, July 13 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific / 18:30 Central Europe and will also be covered on Chess.com/TV.
The live broadcast of day three.
After the epic matches on Friday and Saturday, Dominguez's win against Santos in the final was not bad either, despite the fact that it lasted just four games. All four were highly interesting.
In the first game, both players proved they are on top of the latest theory in the Open Catalan. We know Dominguez is a great theoretician, but Santos has done his homework too!
Game two was a 6.d3 Ruy Lopez where Dominguez got the first chance to take the lead. He ended with a passed pawn and two rooks on the seventh and was probably winning. With only a minute left on the clock to find the win, he decided to take the perpetual.
The third game was probably Santos' worst in the tournament. His treatment of the Nimzo-Indian lacked punch, and Black was better out of the opening. Voluntarily weakening his kingside made matters worse for the 24-year-old Spaniard and allowed a standard attack that many of our readers would have been able to execute as well.
Dominguez could decide this best-of-four match by forcing a perpetual in the last game. He definitely deserved to be the winner as he was also winning in this game.
The Masters tournament is part of a bigger festival that runs for a whole week. There is also a simultaneous exhibition with 25 boards by Dominguez on July 13 (at 09:30 a.m. Pacific / 18:30 Central Europe), an open blitz tournament (July 14) where the eight top finishers will qualify for a knockout final (July 15), and a closed tournament (July 16-18) with four of the most promising upcoming stars of the chess world.
Find all info about these events here.
Previous reports:
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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