The winner of the National Cup stage of Moscow Open Sergei Lobanov talked about his success in a conversation with the commentators of the official website of the tournament Eldar Mukhametov and Alina Bivol.
- Sergei, congratulations! Tell us how the tournament was unfolding for you.
- Thank you! At the beginning not bad, I was going three out of three, but then I had three draws against the players with the rating by 150-200 points less than mine. Then I thought that something was going wrong. Then I was lucky in two games, one of them I could lose. The opponent should have checkmated but in time-trouble he made a big mistake and I got an important point. The second key game was against Klementi Sichev. He played a lateral line in Spanish opening 5…Ka5. I was looking through it just two-three minutes before the game, I had to calculate at the table if I was to lose a piece. I knew that everything was supposed to be fine but spent about 20 minutes to double check the variations. After the 15th move I had only two minutes left before the end of the game, and the opponent had one hour and twenty minutes and a winning position (laughing). After that Klementi started thinking a lot, and I decided that it was my chance! I started replying to his moves very quickly, and it allowed me to save time, and it turned out that he started making small mistakes, and I was playing accurately and won.
