A humble fellow, but one that knows his talents. He knows he is good, though he also knows he needs to work more if he is to become better. Currently sitting at number 13 in the world his main ambition is to qualify for the Candidates tournament via either the World Cup or the Grand Swiss.

In the more relaxed atmosphere after the ceremony, there was also some blitz involved as I saw him play against various opponents. It was incredible how he reminded me of Magnus Carlsen playing blitz. The common denominator was speed and very high quality of the moves, practically without any blunders.

I remember reading the same description about Bobby Fischer after his legendary victory in the Herceg Novi blitz tournament in 1970 when he was 4.5 points ahead of Tal, Korchnoi, Petrosian and the rest. As they said, he played blitz in the same manner as he played slow chess.

This is exactly the feature I would like to emphasize. They play chess, blitz or classical, as it comes naturally to them, and the best word I can use to describe this manner is smooth.

I would like to illustrate this smoothness with an excerpt from what turned out to be the decisive game in the European Individual Championship. In the penultimate round, two of the brightest Russian talents met on Board 1. A win in that game nearly guaranteed a win in the tournament (or a shared first place at least).

Playing Black, Andrey Esipenko chose the Grunfeld Defence, aiming for a dynamic struggle. But Artemiev managed to control the developments by keeping a firm grip on Black’s activity and slowly he started to extinguish it. The position below is after Black’s 22^nd move. White managed to simplify the game and largely limit Black’s usual activity in the Grunfeld. Now he intends to use the remaining pieces to exert pressure on Black’s queenside and use his central space advantage.