PRESS RELEASE
The 19th Amber Blindfold and Rapid Tournament takes place at the Palais de la Mediterranée, a legendary hotel on the world-famous Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, from March 12 to 25, 2010. The event is organized by the Association Max Euwe of chess maecenas Joop van Oosterom, which is based in Monaco.
The new number one in the world rankings, Magnus Carlsen, is the top-seed in Nice. Also present are Levon Aronian, the winner of the past two Amber tournaments, and Vladimir Kramnik, who won the Amber tournament a record six times.
The following twelve grandmasters will take part (between brackets their country and their rating in the January 1, 2010 world rankings):
Magnus Carlsen (Norway, 2810),
Vladimir Kramnik (Russia, 2788),
Levon Aronian (Armenia, 2781),
Boris Gelfand (Israel, 2761),
Vugar Gashimov (Azerbaijan, 2759),
Vasily Ivanchuk (Ukraine, 2749),
Peter Svidler (Russia, 2744),
Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine, 2737),
Alexander Morozevich (Russia, 2732),
Sergey Karjakin (Russia, 2720),
Leinier Dominguez (Cuba, 2712)
and Jan Smeets (The Netherlands, 2657).
Source: ChessVibes.com
Papa Carlsen spoke: http://blog.magnuschess.com/
Is it just me or does Jan Smeets, and Van Wely get to play in a lot of events that they shouldn’t. It must be nice to have a federation that advocates for you often.
Van Oosterom is dutch and he supports dutch chessplayers. And that is ok to me.If you don’t like it, organise your own events.
@Anonymous 9:39AM: You might as well have asked “why not Nakamura or Caruana?”. However, Smeets won the qualifier (Rising Stars vs. Experience) ahead of both of them. Probably being Dutch helped him to get invited to the qualifier, for the rest he _earned_ it!
It will be great to watch 2010 Winter Games – Hotels, i have bought tickets from
http://ticketfront.com/event/2010_Winter_Games_Hotels-tickets looking forward to it.