The first games of the Second Round of the FIDE World Cup were played on September 13 in Ugra Chess Academy.

Hikaru Nakamura's loss to Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu was one of the main headlines of the day. The grandmaster from Germany, playing Black, employed an interesting queen sacrifice and took the upper hand in a complicated game that followed.

Nisipeanu had some concerns during the game, though. "I remembered that I looked at it but I could not remember the conclusions. This is always a problem when you're not repeating the line before the game which I haven't done. I was quite nervous" – confessed the winner.

Despite this convincing victory, Liviu-Dieter is far from complacency: "I expect to face a beast [tomorrow]. I know what's coming. I hope to survive but obviously, it will be extremely tough!"

Another unexpected result occurred in Wei Yi - AntonGuijarro: the Spanish grandmaster won as black against a much higher rated opponent.

Shakhriyar Mamedyarov (Azerbaijan) won against Rustam Kasimdzhanov (Uzbekistan), Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France) defeated Igor Kovalenko (Latvia), Nihal Sarin (India) convincingly outplayed Eltaj Safarli (Azerbaijan), Jan-Krzysztof Duda (Poland) was stronger than Tamir Nabaty (Israel), Evgeny Tomashevsky (Russia) downed Chithambaram Aravindh (India), Vladimir Fedoseev (Russia) lost to Pentala Harikrishna (India), Levon Aronian (Armenia) trounced Parham Maghsoodloo (Iran), Vladislav Artemiev (Russia) got the best of Ivan Cheparinov (Georgia), and Sergey Karjakin (Russia) prevailed in the encounter with Samuel Sevian (USA).

All other games, namely Abasov-Dominguez, Andreikin-Jumbayev, Sjugirov-Radjabov, Inarkiev-Xu Xiangyu, Demchenko-So, Huschenbeth-Vitiugov, Nepomniachtchi-Predke, Adhiban-Yu Yangyi, Jones-Jakovenko, Vidit-Rakhmanov, Grischuk-Bok, Ding Liren-Movsenian, Najer-Giri, Dubov-Firouzja, Matlakov-Gelfand, Wang Hao-Rodshtein, Svidler-Esipenko, Alekseenko-Christiansen, Korobov-Le Quang Liem, Xiong-Tabatabaei, and Yuffa - McShane were drawn.

The last encounter came down to a rare position two bishops vs. knight (no pawns). According to 5-piece Nalimov database white wins in 68 moves, but the Russian GM failed to find the correct algorithm and the game was drawn on the move 132.

The second games of the matches with the colors reversed will be played on September 14.

Official website: https://khantymansiysk2019.fide.com/en/

General partner – Gazpromneft-Khantos LCC.
Official airline – Utair.
Official partners of the competition: OJSC Rostelecom, Ugra Chess Academy, Russian Chess Federation, AB InBev Efes and PJSC Rosneft.
FIDE official partner – JSCo "RZD".
General media partner – News Agency TASS.
Media partners – Match TV, World of Chess social network, OTRC "Ugra", Ugra-news.ru News of Ugra regional newspaper, AIF-Ugra newspaper.