21 years after her mother won the title, WGM Lu Miaoyi clinched her first Chinese Women’s Championship on Thursday in Xinhua, Jiangsu, China. The 14-year-old prodigy defeated WGM Ni Shiqun in a blitz playoff after both had tied for first place with a 9/11 score and all tiebreaks were equal. In the open section, GM Wang Yue won his third title after earlier victories in 2005 and 2013.
The Chinese Championships were held for the 16th year in a row in Xinhua, Jiangsu, a county-level city in eastern China with about 1.5 million inhabitants. It’s a chess-minded city where China’s biggest prodigy Hou Yifan was born in 1994. Hou won the Chinese Women’s Championship in 2007 and 2008, at an even younger age than Lu is now.
In this year’s women’s section, the situation after 11 rounds was remarkable, with Lu and Ni sharing first as the only players to remain undefeated and not a single tiebreak able to split them. They had drawn their mutual game, and (for the technical-minded) their Sonneborn-Berger, Koya, and number of victories were all the same. According to Chinese media, Lu won the title scoring 2-0 in a blitz playoff, but those games were not recorded, it seems.
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