Chess Weekly

Such a tournament has been held in Yongchuan, China recently. It is already the second competition of this kind; the last year Yasser Seirawan and Nigel Short compete with each other exchanging partners – the Chinese lady players Zhu Chen and Xie Jun.
This time they implemented yet another novelty: each partner within one team makes two moves in a row instead of one in his turn. If a player violates the turn of move rule, then the player's team obtains a warning. The second violation of this kind is penalized by subtracting two minutes on the team's clock, or a half of remaining time if less then 4 minutes left. The third violation means defeat.
It was a round robin tournament with two rounds in rapid chess – 25 minutes per game with 10 seconds increment per move. The team composition was as following: Nigel Short/Jao Xie, Ye Jiangchuan/Xu Yuhua, Evgeny Bareev/Xie Jun and Yasser Seirawan/Zhu Chen.
The rating favorite pair, Evgeny Bareev/Xie Jun finished their performance by sharing the last place. On the first day they lost all three games! Their black mischief sneaked up – the partners' opening repertoires were absolutely incompatible! Evgeny did not lost his sense of humor and told Xie: "If you want to obtain an equal position, then play 1.d4; if you want to obtain worse, then play 1.e4". She replied: "Then let us check out 1.Nf3" It was the first move in their game 3 but all the same it ended with defeat.
However, on the second day the Russian-Chinese duet recollected themselves and obtained 2.5 points out of 3, sharing places 3-4 with the Chinese tandem. First place – N.Short/Jao Xie (4 of 6), followed by Y.Seirawan/Zhu Chen (3 of 6).