Ostensen Wins Maia
By Cameron W. · Mon, 31 Aug 2026
Nicolai Maxime Ostensen won the Maia Chess Open outright, finishing on 7.5/9 after a final-round draw with GM Liam Vrolijk was enough to hold off Tim Janzelj, who finished second at 7. It's a fitting end to a tournament that kept reshuffling its leaderboard from the very first weekend to the last.
Nicolai Maxime Ostensen won the Maia Chess Open outright, finishing on 7.5/9 after a final-round draw with GM Liam Vrolijk was enough to hold off Tim Janzelj, who finished second at 7. It's a fitting end to a tournament that kept reshuffling its leaderboard from the very first weekend to the last.How the title actually got decidedThe tournament's real turning point came a round early. Ostensen beat his closest rival at the time, Daniel Romero Pallares, in a direct round-eight showdown, taking the sole lead outright. That half-point cushion turned out to be exactly enough: both Ostensen and Janzelj drew their final-round games, Ostensen against Vrolijk, Janzelj against Havard Haug, and the gap between them never closed. Romero Pallares, who'd shared the lead as recently as round seven, never fully recovered from that round-eight loss and finished well back at 6.5.A tournament that resisted a runaway leader all the way throughThis was never a story about one player pulling clear early. Six players shared the lead after round three. By round seven, Ostensen had a share of a different logjam. Only in round eight did a real gap finally open up, and even then it was just half a point. The final standings reflect exactly that competitiveness: eleven players finished tied for third at 6.5, an enormous group separated from the champion by a single half-point swing across nine rounds.The top seed's long road backGM Liam Vrolijk's tournament had a strange shape from start to finish. The only player in the 136-strong field rated above 2500, he lost a round-two upset to untitled Norwegian William Alexander Olsen and looked, for a while, like he might fade out of contention entirely. He didn't. Vrolijk ground his way back to finish on 6 points, a share of 16th place, good enough to say he salvaged a respectable result, but well outside the conversation for the title his rating alone would have suggested he was favored for.Other threads worth closing outWIM Javiera Belen Gomez Barrera, fresh off winning last year's Queens tournament at this same festival, finished on 5.5, a tie for 27th in a stacked field, a solid follow-up performance even without matching that previous title. William Alexander Olsen, the man who beat Vrolijk in round two, finished tied for third at 6.5 himself, a strong showing from the tournament's biggest early giant-killer.The final pictureOstensen's title came down to controlling the one match that mattered most and then playing it safe once he had the lead he needed. In a field this bunched, from six leaders after round three to eleven players sharing third at the finish, that combination of one decisive strike and a steady close was enough to separate a champion from a genuinely crowded field of contenders.