The 5th round of the Hasselbacken Open 2016 saw the top two games viz. Mareco-Almasi and Maze-Smirin end peacefully. This allowed a whole bunch of players to move into joint lead. After 5 rounds of play, as many as 9 players, including Former World Championship Candidate GM Dmitry Andreikin and Indian GMs Sethuraman and Adhiban, are in lead with 4.5/5.
The highlight of the day, however, was teenage American GM Samuel Sevian’s spectacular victory over GM Alexei Shirov with the black pieces. The Latvian GM, typical to his style, played an interesting Rook sacrifice on move 21. However, he was unable to follow it up in the best of ways, thus ending up quite worse. Nevertheless, the position on the board was extremely complicated and it took Sevian a stunning Rook sacrifice to finally end up on the winning side.
In the 6th round of the event, top-seed GM Andreikin will take on GM Sethuraman while GM Adhiban is paired against GM Landa.