In this video, FM Selim Gürcan reports on the 14-year-old Turkish talent Atilla Kuru at the strong XLIV Open Internacional Villa de Benasque in Spain, and on a moving gesture by his father, Dr. Oğuzhan Kuru, who drove 600 km to bring a Turkish flag to the playing hall.
Supported by Evren Ucok
Atilla Kuru is one of the young talents supported by Evren Ucok, the entrepreneur who backs promising young players. This support has been an important part of Atilla’s rise and of the strong results he is achieving at the board.
A strong start from 35th seed
According to the video, Atilla (rating 2428) started the tournament as the 35th seed and climbed to first place, with 5.5 points from six rounds when the video was recorded. Selim notes that, at just 14 years old – the same age as Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş – Atilla was playing at a performance level of around 2699 in the event. Official crosstables list his sixth-round game against GM Emin Ohanyan (2491), which is the one analysed below.
600 km for a flag
What moved Selim most was something that happened off the board. Dr. Oğuzhan Kuru noticed that there was no Turkish flag among the national flags in the playing hall and asked the organisers to fix it, but no flag could be found. The venue is in a remote part of the Pyrenees, so delivery was not an option either. He phoned the Turkish consulate in Barcelona, then simply got in his car: 300 km there and 300 km back, to collect the flag and have it hung in the hall.
Selim adds that he thought to himself that it would be wonderful if Atilla won a good game after such a journey, so that he could publish the video – and that is exactly what happened.
The game: Kuru – Ohanyan
With White, Atilla met the French Defence with the Tarrasch Variation (3.Nd2). Black grabbed a pawn on e5 and then pushed the kingside pawns (…h5, …g5, …f5), which Selim describes as an aggressive but risky approach. Atilla calmly pinned the knight with Bb5, won the d5 pawn, and after the queens came off he picked up another pawn with Rxe5. The turning point came when Black took on b3 and later played …Kd7?, allowing the quiet king march Kf1–e1 and the strong Bg1 – a move the video calls hard to imagine as a winner. After 32…f3 33.Kd1 the black rook on c2 had nowhere to go and Black resigned.
Note: the game was not available in the tournament's online broadcast. The moves were reconstructed from the board shown in the video, checked move by move for legality, and the date is inferred from the round schedule.
Watch the video
Video: Satranç Okulu, narrated by FM Selim Gürcan (July 10, 2025). Photos: stills from the video.
