Ivan Ivanisevic, Serbian champion for the year 2008, is achieving his all-time highest rating of 2664 at the July FIDE list. His Olympiad debut was in Elista 1998 when he was still a young International Master. Ivan is the last U2700 player who managed to defeat Magnus Carlsen (and with Black pieces) and it happened in the last round of the 2007 ETCC. Carlsen still took individual medal for the first board score.
Yet another team that will participate at the Chess Olympiad in Dresden has revealed its setup. This is team Armenia, that will surely be one of the favorites for the title.
Having in mind that Dresden Chess Olympiad starts only twelve days after the end of the World Championship match between Kramnik and Anand, it is obvious that Russia wants to reclaim their dominance after losing the last two Olympiads to Ukraine and Armenia respectively. Russia took their last team gold at the 2002 Bled Olympiad when Garry Kasparov played on board one.
Three IM norms were awarded at the just finished First Saturday tournament. Nguyen,Huynh Minh Huy /VIE/, Liu, Qingnan /CHN/, Gao, Rui /CHN/ managed to get the necessary points for the IM norms.
Vladimir Kramnik will take participation in the traditional super-tournament Mikhail Tal Memorial, which will be held in Moscow from 18th to 28th August. Kramnik is back to defend the last year’s winner trophy, when he confidently took the first place, full point ahead of Alexei Shirov.
The 36th edition of the super tournament in Dortmund, which will take place on 28th June – 6th July at the Dortmund’s Civic Theater, is promising a delightful competition. The tournament format of seven rounds all-play-all will dictate a specific approach to the games. In such a short race, every win could be a breakthrough to the top of the crosstable and every loss could turn a player into tail-ender.
We stumbled across an interesting item in Ukrainian newspaper “Gazeta” via link from the excellent Russian website e3e5.com. The bottom of this short article quotes Aron Meiberg, general manager of the Aerosvit, saying that the next year’s tournament will be played in an airplane and with rapid time control.
The last round game between Sergey Karjakin and Magnus Carlsen was a short but exciting affair. Karjakin wanted to avoid Sicilian Dragon this time and opened with 1.d4, to which Carlsen replied with Gruenfeld Indian defence. White sacrificed a pawn to force dark-squared Bishops exchange and stormed against Black weakened King. Carlsen had to defend for a while, but after the Queen’s trade, the resulting position was roughly equal ending and players agreed to draw on 29th move.
FIDE will visit Lviv next week Literally every day news is coming about the match Kamsky – Topalov. This time the information came from Ukraine, from the online edition of Newsukraine. Here is the text of the article. On Thursday, June 19, the Crimean city Foros will see the decisive 11th round of Aerosvit 2008. [...]
Our friend Viktor Novotný from the Novoborsky Chess Club has just sent us hot news that GM Sergei Movsesian, 2008 Corus B winner and new member of the exclusive 2700 rating club, will log in the club’s website tonight for a live chat with visitors from all over the world.
