Russia's Evgeny Tomashevsky staggered across the finish line of the European Individual Championship. He outlasted countryman Malakhov in the final match of rapid and blitz KO tiebreaks to find the winner. ChessBase has the details. There was another big set of tiebreak matches to find the qualifiers to the next FIDE World Cup. Motylev got to play a nice queen sac against Mikhalevski in their second game; just ignore that he was already winning. Jobava's 24..Rxd6! is a very nice deflection shot (24..Re8 25.f3 and the bishop defends the Ne1). 11.Bh6 is quite a looker in Kurnosov-Nisipeanu, but as so often happens it turns out to have been played many times before, first in 1995, and a couple of times against Nisipeanu. Our man Kurnosov lost the second game, losing even the theoretical chance of a World Cup meeting with Mamedyarov, who will likely make it in on rating.
A rather slapstick finish to such an impressive event, but I guess KO blitz to qualify for a KO makes some sort of sense. I already listed the many high-profile names who won't be in the tiebreaks due to their failure in this event. There seems like there are so many cockamamie ways to get into the world championship mix these days it's hard to take anything seriously as a last chance.
[danyplayer points out that some players who already qualified for the World Cup at last year's Euro Ch in Plovdiv skipped the tiebreaks since they don't decide any money, just qualification. He mentions Bologan and Papaioannou.]
