This year the event had a round robin format with eight players. The additional sponsorship boosted the level of the tournament which featured the strongest lineup ever.

The Italian champion Fabiano Caruana won the competition with an excellent score of 5.5/7 points, leaving the main contender Peter Leko of Hungary half a point behind.

Fabiano Caruana

Leko followed the strong pace imposed by the leader and his last-round victory against the over-ambitious Li Chao put some pressure on Caruana. The Italian, however, confidently outplayed Jonny Hector and preserved the top position.

The local hope Nils Grandelius was in the mix for the top two places until he lost to the future tournament winner.

Replay all games with computer analysis

Final standings:
1. GM Caruana Fabiano ITA 2770 – 5.5
2. GM Leko Peter HUN 2723 – 5
3-4. GM Grandelius Nils SWE 2556 and GM Giri Anish NED 2693 – 4
5. GM Li Chao CHN 2703 – 3
6. GM Tikkanen Hans SWE 2566 – 2.5
7-8. GM Berg Emanuel SWE 2587 and GM Hector Jonny SWE 2560 – 2

Official website

The 47th Capablanca Memorial was held from 3rd to 15th May at the Riviera hotel in Havana, Cuba. The Elite Group was a six-player double round robin.

Ivanchuk confidently held the lead throughout the tournament, with three wins and seven draws being sufficient for the first place, full point ahead of the opposition.

Vassily Ivanchuk

Cuban hope GM Leinier Domínguez Perez (2730), three-times champion of Capablanca Memorial, also scored three wins, but suffered two defeats, both at the hands of genius from Lviv.

Domínguez’s last round victory against Ian Nepomniachtchi allowed him to catch the Russian on the shared 2nd place.

Replay all games with computer analysis

Elite Group final standings:

1. Ivanchuk Vassily UKR 2764 – 6.5
2-3. Nepomniachtchi Ian RUS 2716 and Dominguez Perez Leinier CUB 2725 – 5.5
4. Potkin Vladimir RUS 2642 – 4.5
5-6. Quesada Perez Yuniesky CUB 2625 and Laznicka Viktor CZE 2693 – 4.0

The Premier Group was a 10-player round robin with other top Cuban players and four foreign Grandmasters.

GM Gonzalez Vidal Yuri took a clear first place with 6.0/9 points, while IM Bacallao Alonso Yusnel confirmed another GM norm.

Premier Group final standings:

1. GM Gonzalez Vidal Yuri CUB 2545 – 6
2. GM Cordova Emilio PER 2566 – 5.5
3. IM Bacallao Alonso Yusnel CUB 2580 – 5
4-7. GM Rakhmanov Aleksandr RUS 2603, GM Morovic Fernandez Ivan CHI 2577, GM Papin Vasily RUS 2570 and GM Hernandez Carmenates Holden CUB 2570 – 4.5
8. GM Almeida Quintana Omar CUB 2525 – 4
9. GM Ortiz Suarez Isan Reynaldo CUB 2572 – 3.5
10. GM Alvarez Pedraza Aramis CUB 2551 – 3

The Open 1, for the players rated above 2200 FIDE, had 114 participants from nine countries. Among them were 14 Grandmasters and 34 International Masters.

FIDE Masters Hevia Alejano Carlos Antonio (CUB 2542) and Espinosa Veloz Ermes (CUB 2441) shared the first place with 7.5/10 points each.

The Open 2, for the players rated under 2300 FIDE, had 127 players from 14 federations. Marzo Arias Valentin (CUB 2176) won the event in convincing fashion with 8.5/10 points.

Established since 1962 on the initiative of Commander Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the tournament is held annually in honor of the renowned Cuban and world figure Jose Raul Capablanca.

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Dramatic finishes punctuated an unpredictable day at the 2012 U.S. Championship and U.S. Women’s Championship. When the final pawn was captured, a 101-move game ended in king versus king. In both events a pair of trailing players caught up to the leaders.

IM Anna Zatonskih got the better of WIM Iryna Zenyuk in a bishop-and-pawn endgame. With weaknesses on both sides of the board, Zatonskih had no trouble infiltrating and clearing a path for her pawns.

Entering the day behind by one-half point, the win nearly gave Zatonskih sole possession of the lead, as tournament leader IM Irina Krush got all she could handle from IM Rusudan Goletiani. In an atypical affair where Krush’s king voluntarily moved to f1 and Goletiani’s knights occupied f8 and h8, both players thought they were better. “Once the knights come out, my advantage is not permanent,” Krush said.

Krush was caught off guard by the sacrifice 35…Nxf3. Afterward, she expected the immediate material equalization 36…e4, but instead the initiative-minded Goletiani preferred to step up the pressure by making a battery on the f-file. Krush survived the onslaught largely by ignoring it. Her counterattack was just enough to force a repetition of position.

The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (CCSCSL)

The top two rated women will face off tomorrow. In what has become their usual yearly battle, they enter the game tied for first with 4.5/6. Neither woman has lost a game. “Good thing I didn’t ruin everything today,” Krush said. “It was sharp; anything could have happened.”

The story repeated in the U.S. Championship, where tournament front-runner GM Hikaru Nakamura tried everything he could but could only draw against GM Yury Shulman. This allowed defending champion GM Gata Kamsky to catch up, as he was able to overcome the blockade of GM Alex Stripunsky.

Nakamura and Shulman played the longest game of the tournament. After five and a half hours and 101 moves, they were down to just their kings. After fruitlessly trying for more than 60 moves to win with an extra kingside pawn, Nakamura looked across the room for much of the final moves, seemingly chastising himself for missed opportunities.

Shulman guessed that he was unhappy the minor pieces were allowed to be traded after 77…Be6+. Thanks to the zwischenzug 78…Re5+, Shulman entered an easily drawing rook-and-pawn endgame. Still, he insisted that the ending is drawn even without the “petite combinaison.” Nakamura has still never defeated Shulman in a tournament game.

Shulman’s staunch defense, coupled with the tenacity of Kamsky to find a way to clear the path for his hanging pawns, means Nakamura and Kamsky are now equal first with 5/7. They will not meet until Friday’s penultimate round ten.

Stripunsky and Kamsky had drawn many previous games, but today Kamsky won for the first time ever in classical chess, though he had won a rapid game in 2006. After a lot of circular movement, Kamsky made the time control and got his c- and d-pawns moving. In the final position, he had promoted a second queen, with one more on the way.

The most entertaining game of the day was unequivocally GM Alejandro Ramirez against GM Gregory Kaidanov. After a stunning victory, Ramirez was still trying to collect himself and figure out what happened. “This game was crazy,” he said. With arrows and variations strewn haphazardly all over the computer screen in the commentary room, Ramirez offered what he knew about the game, and what he was still sorting out. “I was just trying to get to the time control alive,” he said. “This was psychologically very difficult for me because I went from winning to really struggling. We had like two minutes left. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

With both kings in danger, the underdeveloped Kaidanov found the subtle defense of retreating his one developed piece on move 32. “…Rg8! Wow! That was quite a move,” Ramirez said. The point was that the rook on a8 cannot be captured due to 33…Qe3+ 34. Kh1 (34. Rf2 Rf8) 34…Qg3 35. Rg1 (35. Bh3 Rxa8) 35…Qxh4#. In all variations, the wandering white queen is suddenly out of bounds.

But after the time scramble resourcefulness, Kaidanov placed his king on the light square e4 and fell victim to an advancing a-pawn. Scrambling to get his rook back again, this time he was met with a skewer on the long diagonal. Ramirez was shocked at the turn of events, which saw him go from groveling for a draw to simply winning. After starting with two wins and two draws and sharing the early lead, Kaidanov has lost his last three.

Chasing Kamsky and Nakamura with 4/7 are Shulman and GMs Alex Lenderman and Alex Onischuk, who also drew today. Onischuk received one of the biggest surprises of the tournament when his former student, GM Ray Robson, uncorked the implausible Belgrade Gambit. Onischuk played the only move he knew against it, 5…Be7. He admitted that his theoretical knowledge ended there, as his position was super solid. “The position was equal all the time, but he still tried to torture me,” Onischuk said. Asked if he would now learn more about the opening, he continued, “If I play against some 2300-player, I’ll have to come up with something else.”

Lenderman kept his unbeaten streak alive by holding the draw in mixed battle against GM Yasser Seirawan. “It was one of the strangest games I ever played,” Lenderman said. “It was unclear all the time. I thought I was better with initiative or attack, but after a turn of events, I was in a precarious endgame. But then without an obvious mistake from him, I was playing for a win.”

Seirawan guessed that he should have made better use of his kingside pawn phalanx. After losing his first three games, Seirawan, a four-time champion, has now won 2.5 out of his last four.

GM Varuzhan Akobian again jettisoned his favorite French Defense but used the Caro-Kann to eventually win a knight-and-pawn ending against GM Robert Hess.

FM Alisa Melekhina won her second game in a row to earn a plus score. She sits on 3.5/6 after winning against the luckless WGM Camilla Baginskaite. Melekhina already has more than twice the number of points she earned in seven rounds last year. “I didn’t expect Alisa to play so aggressively with such theoretical stuff,” Baginskaite said afterward.

Melekhina repeated her Moscow System that she previously used against Krush, but this time she offered her two center pawns to open the game quickly. “I’m not sure it’s objectively the best thing to do, but practically it is,” Melekhina said of her bellicosity. The fork 24. Qf3 pressured her opponent sufficiently to make a catastrophic error, dropping a knight. “I didn’t want to get so hopeful because the other day against Alena Kats I was up the exchange and four pawns and she fought back so hard.”

In other women’s games, WGM Tatev Abrahamyan bravely walked her king up the board in beating WGM Sabina Foisor. WIM Viktorija Ni got back to an even score by using her extra rook to eventually overpower WFM Alena Kats’s bishop.

Round eight for the U.S. Championship and round seven for the U.S. Women’s Championship will begin tomorrow at 1 p.m. Central, 2 p.m. Eastern. Come visit the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis or tune in to www.uschesschamps.org for live commentary from WGM Jennifer Shahade and the club’s GM-in-Residence Ben Finegold.

For the 22nd time in a row the town of Jyväskylä organises the most important chess tournament of its country, the Heart of Finland Open.

From 9th to 15 July more than 150 players are expected to be competing for title of the champion, the category prizes, rating points, and simply for the joy of playing chess.

The dates coincide with the town’s Summer Festival, a rich cultural week with theatre and music performances on the streets of Jyväskylä – a pleasant spare time programme for the participants.

In the comfort of the playing hall: spacious, air-conditioned and wifi-equipped!

Besides the Summer Festival, an evening cruise is organised for the players on the Lake Päijänne – an excursion which, the author of this article can highly recommend!

Excursion for the players on the beautiful lakes of Finland

For more information on the tournament please contact the organisers from the official website.

15 titled players (8 grandmasters!) have already confirmed their participation! Will GM Yrjö Rantanen be able to defend his title?

GM Yrjö Rantanen

Anna Rudolf on the boat trip in 2010 - cover of the magazine Suomen Shakki

Photo courtesy of the Heart of Finland organisers, Chessdom and Anna Rudolf.

On the same day, the German visitor with artificial intelligence will play a demo match against one of the world’s strongest human players – Alexander Grischuk, the former World Blitz Champion and a representative of the Russian national team.

Both competitions will be held in blitz chess format, in which the players are given 5 minutes per game, in accordance with FIDE rules.

The Russian robot CHESSka, the first chess robot to beat grandmasters in blitz chess, was created by Konstantin Kosteniuk, Honored Coach of Russian Chess and an inventor with tens of registered patents.

CHESSka is already well-known among Russian chess fans. This “chess terminator” has played against former world champions Vladimir Kramnik and Alexandra Kosteniuk, as well as Sergei Karyakin, one of Russia’s leading players, and has beaten a number of well-known grandmasters.

Challenging our hardware heavyweight for the title will be KUKA Monstr, created by the German company KUKA Robotics, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of industrial robots.

Though it is younger than its Russian opponent, its creators favor it to win the match. They say that blitz chess is precisely where KUKA can fully manifest its intelligence, accuracy and speed.

Other world-class robot makers showing interest in developing chess-playing robots include FANUC Corporation of Japan and ABB of Sweden.

The winner of the match will receive the title of First in History Absolute World Robot Blitz Chess Champion. The organizers plan to hold such events every year, creating a Big League of chess robots called ChessRoboLiga-1 for makers of industrial robots, analogous to Formula 1 for automakers.

Spectators of the event on Strastnoy Boulevard will have a chance to compete in blitz tournaments as part of the Moscow Chess Boulevard competition, play simuls with grandmasters and participate in a competitive program with prizes.

Event program

11.00: Arrival of guests and registration of participants in the tournament and simul
12.00: Start of chess tournament and simul with a GM
12.15: Start of the competition program for the audience
13.00-14.00: Match between KUKA (Germany) and World Blitz Champion Alexander Grischuk (Russia)
14.30-15.30: First round of the match between the two chess robots
15.30-16.00: Awards ceremony honoring the winners of the tournament, participants of the competition program and participants of the session with the GM
16.00-17.00: Second and final part of the meet
17.00: Awards ceremony honoring the creators of the World Champion Chess Robot

Venue: Moscow, Strastnoy Boulevard (Pushkinskaya and Chekhovskaya subway stations)

Organizers: Summa Group, the Russian Chess Federation, the Center for Physical Education and Sports of Moscow’s Central Administrative District and the Tigran Petrosyan Chess Club with the participation of the Foundation for Creative Chess, the Vladimir Dvorkovich Chess Parlor, and ChessQueen Company.

For more information, call Eldar Mukhametov on +7 916 5425224 or email him at moscowchess@gmail.com.

Teaching chess at school may significantly improve pupils’ mathematics learning abilities, according to a study by INVALSI (the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System) conducted as part of a controlled research project involving some 2,000 8-and 9-year-old children attending a sample of primary schools throughout Italy.

The SAM research project investigating the effects of learning to play chess on maths skills, developed by academic staff members Gianluca Argentin (Milan-Bicocca University), Alberto Martini (University of East Piedmont) and Barbara Romano (University of Pennsylvania), is the most recent in a series of studies on the potential advantages of chess in education promoted and conducted by the Piedmont Regional Committee of the Italian Chess Federation, presided over by Dr. Roberto Rivello, funded by Piedmont Regional Council and Compagnia di San Paolo.

Their findings have now been brought together and published by Prof. Roberto Trinchero from the University of Turin and will be the subject of a conference on 28 May 2012 at the Piedmont Region’s “Centro Incontri” congress centre in Turin.

The conference, which is open to the public, will mainly address primary and secondary-school teachers and will also discuss the possible implications of the European Parliament’s recent declaration on the introduction of the “Chess in School” programme in the educational systems of the European Union.

Chess has been part of the curriculum in schools in Piedmont for some time now. Initially only implemented in the city of Turin, under an initiative pioneered by the renowned Turin Chess Club, the project was subsequently extended to the rest of the region as a positive consequence of the Chess Olympiad 2006 held in Turin.

Each year approximately 20,000 state school pupils aged between 6 and 19 from more than 1,000 classes at 300 schools are included in the programme and Federation instructors provide a total of 12,000 hours of lessons during school hours.

Lessons are based on teaching protocols issued by the Piedmont Regional Committee of the Italian Chess Federation which, coordinated by Alessandro Dominici and working closely in partnership with the competent bodies of the Italian Chess Federation and the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), has also organised numerous training courses for instructors and teachers at state schools, awarding diplomas to 380 new Federation instructors and teachers. The figures are encouraging, but we still have a long way to go.

Representatives from the most important organisations around the world involved in teaching chess at school will take part in the conference, also via video-conference.

It will be broadcast live on internet, with simultaneous translation into English. This event has been conceived as the natural continuation of the International conference “Chess: a game to grow up with” that was held in Turin in 2009, during which speakers from four continents discussed the advantages and positive effects of the various initiatives and methods of teaching chess at school.

For full details please visit www.piemontescacchi.org

The 9-round Swiss open is organized by the Bulgarian Chess Federation, Chess Club “Dobrich – Albena” and Albena JSCo.

Albena is one of the most popular resorts on the Bulgarian Black Sea.

It is located 11 km south of Balchik and 30 km north of Varna – the sea capital of Bulgaria. Albena holds a “Blue Flag” certificate for its ecologically clean sea, beach and area. The soft sandy beach of Albena is more than 3.5 km long and up to 150 m wide.

The resort is located close to Baltata national reserve, thus providing a unique combination of forest and sea. Albena offers something for everyone due to its variety of attractions, water sports and recreational activities.

The average summer temperature is 28°С, and the average temperature of the crystal clear sea is 25°С.

The prize fund amounts to 40.000 EUR. For prizes distribution visit the official website.

Currently top rated players are:

1 GM Akopian Vladimir 2697 ARM
2 GM Georgiev Kiril 2689 BUL
3 GM Cheparinov Ivan 2673 BUL
4 GM Ragger Markus 2670 AUT
5 GM Petrosian Tigran L 2657 ARM
6 GM Gupta Abhijeet 2644 IND
7 GM Melkumyan Hrant 2642 ARM
8 GM Smeets Jan 2620 NED
9 GM Kolev Atanas 2602 BUL
10 GM Kravtsiv Martyn 2588 UKR
11 GM Solak Dragan 2586 TUR
12 GM Grigoryan Avetik 2581 ARM
13 GM Perunovic Milos 2577 SRB
14 GM Tikkanen Hans 2566 SWE
15 GM Nikolov Momchil 2553 BUL
16 GM Li Shilong 2553 CHN
17 GM Nabaty Tamir 2553 ISR
18 GM Heberla Bartlomiej 2535 POL
19 GM Carlsson Pontus 2531 SWE
20 GM Lu Shanglei 2522 CHN
21 IM Grigoryan Karen H 2517 ARM
22 IM Nosenko Alexander 2517 UKR
23 GM Stefansson Hannes 2516 ISL
24 IM Benidze Davit 2516 GEO
25 GM Tadic Branko 2506 SRB
26 IM Grover Sahaj 2506 IND

More information on the official website

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Information: Anand Gelfand 2012 / World Chess Championship all news

Ананд – Гельфанд (руский) / Anand – Gelfand (Español)

Videos: Day 1 / , Day 2 / Day 3

Newsletter: Anand Gelfand 2012 newsletter

Anand and Gelfand start the World Chess Championship 2012 with game 1 on May 11th at 14:00 CET. It will be commented by the European Team Champion GM Arkadij Naiditsch live on Chessdom.com.

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Chess Evolution is the brand that encapsules the highest rated authors on the chess books market. The team is headed by GM Arkadij Naiditsch, permanent member of the 2700 club, while article and contributions are by GM Etienne Bacrot, GM Sebastien Maze, GM Kamil Miton, GM Borki Predojevic, GM Ivan Sokolov, GM Baadur Jobava, etc.

The books by Chess Evolution come out every 2 months and include 400 pages of quality chess research, analysis, novelties, endgames, and lot’s of chess fun.

With the Chess Evolution Maxi Bundle you receive ALL six editions printed so far – March 2011, May 2011, July 2011, September 2011, November 2011, and January 2011 – all for a super discount of 50% and free shipping!