After the eighth round, Tiger Hillarp Persson leads a full point ahead of Daniel Stellwagen. As fate would have it, they play each other in the last round and with the white pieces, the Dutchman will surely do everything in his powers to beat Tiger and share first place.
In the game between Hillarp and Lajos Portisch, the Hungarian player inexplicably took on d7 with his queen instead of his knight on the 14th move, leading to a weakened structure around his king. Consequently, Hillarp had no problems in deciding the game by attacking the black king.
Vasilios Kotronias chose a strange set-up against Timman's Sicilian Bb5 variation. Playing the rook to g6 was indeed original and seemed to work well for him. However, in the 30th move Kotronias must have miscalculated when taking on f3. The forced sequence that followed simply led to a hopeless rook ending.
Kjetil Lie played the aggressive Samisch variation (5.f3) against Stellwagen's King's Indian. The game followed theory for a while and White seemed to have a comfortable position. However, the careless 19.Nf4 allowed the Dutchman to exchange White's imporant black-squared bishop by playing the clever 19. - Ng4!. After this exchange, Black's play on the black fields was far more dangerous than White's play on the white fields. Once the advanced b-pawn had fallen, Lie's position was simply lost.
For 16 moves, the game between Ralf Åkesson and Evgenij Agrest followed Åkesson's fifth round game against Hillarp. This time Åkesson tried 17.g3 (instead of the weak 17.Ne2) and followed it up by sacrificing a pawn (24.a3) to be able to advance in the centre. He had adequate compensation but not more and shortly after recapturing his pawn on c6, the players agreed to a draw.
Lars Bo Hansen quickly got the superior position against Axel Smith. It is hard to find an explanation for why Hansen refused to win a pawn with 19.Bxg5. Later on, he played the horrible 21.e4?, losing the d-pawn after 21. - Bxg3 22.fxg3 Qb6!. Quite a remarkable turnaround! Smith won the exchange and should also have won the game easily. For a while, things looked good but the decision to sacrifice back the exchange (41. - Rxf1+) seemed odd. Even though the rook ending was winning, there were still some technical problems that he had to overcome and Hansen managed to liquidate into a rook+pawn vs queen ending. If Smith had been able to stop white's rook from getting to f5 or h5 (by e.g. 58. - Qf7) the position would still have been won but towards the second time control he went wrong and Hansen reached a position which is a theoretical draw. The game went on for some time but with only seconds remaining, Hansen could force a draw through the 50 move rule.