Tal Memorial 2009
Most of the top rated players, 3-18th November in Moscow, Russia
Report by Chessdom.com
The 2009 Tal Memorial will take place on 3-18th November in Moscow, Russia. According to the September rating list, nine out of eleven top players, including the reigning World Champion Viswanathan Anand, will take participation. Veselin Topalov and Teimour Radjabov are not invited (or confirmed), but the final 10th spot is still available.
Levon Aronian, winner of the FIDE Grand Prix and Grand Slam Final, and probably the most successful tournament player in 2009, is invited to play this year. Norwegian wonderboy Magnus Carlsen will also be there.
Vassily Ivanchuk will defend the last year’s trophy, and Peter Leko and Boris Gelfand are returning to play in their third Tal Memorial.
Former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik and 2007 Tal Memorial winner will lead the Russian contingent. Besides him, Dmitry Jakovenko is participating, while Alexander Morozevich is still awaiting the confirmation. Tenth player is yet to become known.
Nice to have government support for chess.
Tal was one of the better european players in his prime.
Tal in his prime was the BEST (not one of the) player in the WORLD (not europe).
But in any case, since the vast majority of top players are from europe, saying one is among the top european players is same as saying he is one of the top of the world (the same does not hold for America incidentaly:-)).
Once again the pattern repeats. Kramnik is mentioned last in the article. They forget about his winning in Dortmund a Guinness Book World Record. Also they should rightfully still call him the Classical World Champion, because Anand was gifted the title by FIDE, sneaking in with a tournament win and having Kramnik challenge.
“They forget about his winning in Dortmund a Guinness Book World Record.”
1) Guiness Book of World Recods doesn’t mention him at all.
2)He shares the record with kasparov who won Linares 9 times.
While at least the last sentence of Anonymous 5:33PM doesn’t make sense, they (Chessdom) could have mentioned Kramnik’s name earlier, e.g. just after Anand (“world champion Anand and his predecessor Kramnik”). But of course Chessdom isn’t quite free of (anti-Kramnik, anti-Russian) bias … .
BTW, Mig at Dailydirt quotes Peter Svidler giving a slightly different field – which doesn’t include Jakovenko, but includes Ponomariov and Svidler himself.