György Marx Memorial 2010
5th – 16th August 2010, Paks, Hungary
The György Marx Memorial 2010 will feature six Grandmasters – Zoltan Almasi (the first 2700+ player at the event), Ferenc Berkes, Viktor Laznicka, Peter Acs, Jan Timman, and Ray Robson (the first American ever to participate). The event is double round robin and will take place in Paks, Hungary, 5th – 16th August 2010. The average rating of the participants is 2629, which makes it category 16 event.
The women section will have the same dates and format and will have IM Ildikó Mádl, WGM Lilit Galojan, IM Tatiana Kononenko, GM Nona Gaprindashvili, IM Szidónia Vajda, and WIM Lili Tóth. Average rating is 2347. Scroll down for all players presentations.
Official site / The event in 2009
Zoltan Almasi
Zoltan Almasi belongs to the top three grandmasters of Hungary with extra class players as Leko and Judit Polgar. He was not a “Wunderkind”, but in 1993, at the age of 17, Zoltan won the junior world championship and became a grandmaster. He joined the World’s elite very quickly reaching the 2600 level. He has won the Hungarian championship 8 times. He is an important member of the Hungarian national team. He has performed well on almost every Olympiads, especially 2002 where he made an excellent contribution to Hungary’s silver medal. The Elista Olympiad was another highlight of his career with a tremendous score on the first board. He did rather well on the KO World Championships in Tripoli and he was eliminated by the winners only! We can welcome him fourth times in our event. Zoltan always plays exciting games with our grandmasters anytime they meet.
He finished on the 6th place on the European Championship in Rijeka and he qualified himself for the World Cup. He will be the first player over 2700 in the history of the György Marx Memorial.
Ferenc Berkes
The local grandmaster Berkes Ferenc has been member of the Hungarian team since 2000. Ferenc got GM title in 2002. In this year he won the World Championship U18. He was 1st in Zalaegerszeg (Cat 13), 2nd in the Marx Gyorgy memorial (Cat 14), behind Kortchnoi, and he also won the Hungarian Championship. He won the firstly “knock-out system” organized Hungarian Championship in 2007. This year he shared the first place with Almasi due the worst Berger he got the silver medal.
This year he gained admittance to the World Cup from the European Championship in Rijeka. In July he won the Hungarian Championship in Szeged.
Best results:
U18 Heraklio Greece 2002 1st place, Zalaegerszeg 2004 1st place, Marx memorial 2004 2nd place, Budapest Hungarian Ch. 2004 1st place, Junior WCh Istanbul Turkey 2nd place, Budapest Hungarian Ch. 2007 1st place, Martuni Armenia 2009 2nd place, Hungarian Ch. Szeged 2009 2nd place, Hungarian Ch. Szeged 2010 1st place
Viktor Laznicka
After learning the game at age six, he progressed quickly to playing junior tournaments and achieved many prize-winning performances in the national championships across the range of age limits. These included wins in the under-10 category (1997) and the under-12 category (1998 and 1999). He also finished second at the under-18 event in 2001.
At the European Youth Chess Championship, held in Herceg Novi in 2005, he was a bronze-medallist in the under-18 category.
Upon leaving school, he enrolled at the Charles University, Prague, to study Business Administration.
In the early part of Láznička’s tournament career, he was a joint winner at Olomouc in 2002 and at Mariánské Lázně in 2003. He was successful in Brno in both 2005 and 2006, the latter when he won the full national Czech Championship. This was also the year that he qualified as a grandmaster and commenced his Olympiad career, scoring the best individual result of the Czech team in Turin.
In 2007, he was joint winner of the Czech Open (with Vlastimil Babula), held in his home town. He qualified for the Chess World Cup 2007, but was eliminated in the first round by strong Polish player Bartłomiej Macieja.
In 2008, he shared victory with Krishnan Sasikiran at Calcutta and was declared winner on tie-break. He then took a share of second place at the EU Individual Open Chess Championship in Liverpool, behind Jan Werle (and equal with the highly rated Michael Adams and Nigel Short). In December 2009, he tied for 1st-4th with Georg Meier, Julio Granda and Kiril Georgiev in the 19th Magistral Pamplona Tournament. In June 2010, he won the City of Good Wine Rapid tournament in Hustopeče.
Láznička has had several coaches during his chess career, but most recently has been tutored by Sergei Movsesian, a high ranking Slovakian player and one of his team-mates in the Czech league.
As of October 2008, he was the Czech Republic’s fourth highest rated player, after David Navara, Zbyněk Hráček and Vlastimil Babula.
In July 2010, he took clear first place at the World Open Chess Tournament with 7.5/9.
Acs Peter
Ács Péter has started his chess career when he was a very young child. However he became suddenly successful when he won the European championship U12 in Rimasombat. The great breakthrough in his chess career was his first GM norm in 1998. Peter has quickly performed the others, and in 1998 he managed to get the GM title. He did the best of his teenage years at the World Junior Championship in Athens where Peter finished first place with an amazing performance! Thanks to this result, next year Peter got the right to play in Hoogoven. In this tournament he also made a good finish. He won against Polgar, Van Wely and And Halifman, too. He was the winner of Marx memorial in 2007.
He plays only on this individual competition inland. He is a reliable participant on the second board in the Atomerőmű SE team. He achieved outstanding result on the two championships. He gained 9.5 points out of 11 points in ASE and 9 points out of 10 matches in the Austrian team of the winner, Sparkasse Jenbach. He became the most efficient competitor in both championships.
Best results:
U12 EU Ch Rimasombat, Slovakia 1992 1st place, U16 WCh Menorca Spain 1996 3rd place, Junior WCh Athen Greece 2001 1st place, Hoogeven Nederland (cat. 17) 2002 1st place, Pardubice open Czech 2002 2nd place, Marx memorial Paks 2007 1st place
Jan Timman
The most well-known players of our men’s championship is Jan Timman, 58, a Dutch grandmaster.
He is one of the world’s leading players from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. At the peak of his career he was considered to be the best non-Soviet player and was known as “The Best of the West”. He has won the Dutch Chess Championship nine times and has been a Candidate for the World Championship several times.
Timman received the International Master title in 1971 and in 1974 attained Grandmaster status, making him the Netherlands’ third after Max Euwe and Jan Hein Donner. In that year he also won the Dutch Championship for the first time. Last time he did it in 1996.
His international successful career started in the 1970s and in the 1980s and 1990s he was one of an elite chess player. He represented the Netherlands in 13 Chess Olympiads from 1972 to 2004, playing on the top board on 11 occasions.
Timman’s world championship career began at the zonal tournaments at Forssa/Helsinki 1972 and Reykjavik 1975. His win at Amsterdam 1978 took him to his first interzonal tournament. After winning the 1987 Tilburg Interzonal he defeated Valery Salov, Lajos Portisch and Jonathan Speelman, but lost in the final to Anatoly Karpov. He reached the final round once again in 1993, having defeated Robert Hübner, Viktor Korchnoi and Yusupov, but lost this time to Nigel Short. However, after Short and Garry Kasparov played their World Championship match outside of the auspices of the sport’s governing body FIDE, Timman was invited to compete against Karpov for the FIDE version of the world title. He lost the match by 12½ points to 8½.
Ray Robson
He is the youngest participant. He is 15 years old. He is the first American chess-player on the Gyorgy Marx Tournament.
He was born on Guam Islands in October 1994. He lives in Florida with his parents where his father is a linguist professor.
First, he was very successful on the school competitions and on the Pan-American U12 Competition. At the age of 9 he beat his first national master and two years later he got his first grandmaster scalp. He achieved his first Master title in 2006, his Grandmaster title at the end of 2009, two weeks before his 15th birthday. One of his first coaches was Kaidanov. Now Onischuk grandmaster trains him for the tournaments.
Robson will rule.