Needing votes to challenge world’s strongest players

Liem needs votes to challenge world’s strongest players
Tuoi Tre
Updated : Mon, March 5, 2012,12:55 PM (GMT+0700)

Vietnamese chess grandmaster Le Quang Liem will have the chance to challenge players in the world’s top ten if he can win votes to attend the 7th Tal Memorial 2012 championship, to be held this June in Moscow.

The tournament will be attended by 10 of the strongest grandmasters in the world. Six of them have already confirmed their participation. They include Magnus Carlsen, Vladimir Kramnik, Aronian, Radjabov Teimour, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana.

The remaining three participants are to be determined later, while the last ticket will, for the first time in the tournament’s history, be chosen by a vote through the Russian Chess Federation website http://russiachess.org.

Fans of Liem can now visit the Russian language website http://russiachess.org/news/all/vpervie_zriteli_vibiraut_odnogo_iz_uchastnikov_memoriala_talya/, and cast their vote at the section “Whom do you want to see among Tal Memorial – 2012 participants?” at the lower right corner of the page.

The option for Liem is displayed as “Ле, Куанг Лем (LE, QUANG LIEM) (VIE) 2698.”

Should the Vietnamese chess talent earn the highest votes among the 13 proposed participants, he will be in Russia this June to face the world number 1 Manug Carsel (Elo rating 2835), or the world number two Levon Aronian (2820).

Voting will continue until 15:00 (GMT) on March 15.

Other proposed participants include:

The Tal Memorial is a chess tournament held in Moscow each year since 2006, to honor the memory of the former World Champion Mikhail Tal who died in 1992, with the participations of the world’s strongest players whose Elo rating is higher than 2700.

Last year’s Tal Memorial took place in November at the House of Pashkov and aroused great interest among residents and visitors.

Liem back to the International Grandmaster list

With his two victories in a row at the 2012 HDBank International Chess tournament last week, Liem had his Elo rating rose back to the 2,700 mark, enabling him to return to the International Grandmaster list, which includes players with an Elo above 2700.

Earlier, Liem dropped out of the list thanks to his failure at the 2012 Aeroflot Open in Russia, with his Elo rating dropping to 2698.

In the latest development, Liem now ranks second at the tournament, with his wins against Vo Thanh Ninh (Elo 2340) and Chinesee Xiu Deshun (Elo 2492) in the fourth and fifth round of the event.

Chinese player Ni Hua is now leading the tourney with 5 points, 0.5 point higher than the host grandmaster.

Liem is also running his blog on Tuoi Tre, which the Vietnamese version at http://tuoitre.vn/tag/index.html?t=%27Blog%2bL%C3%AA%2bQuang%2bLi%C3%AAm%27, and the English one at the Blog Le Quang Liem box on the right column of TuoiTreNews’s Sports News page http://www.tuoitrenews.vn/cmlink/tuoitrenews/sports.

Source: http://www.tuoitrenews.vn