Upcoming Events: Nanjing, Tal Memorial & the World Blitz Championship
This Wednesday, play begins in the Pearl Spring tournament in Nanjing, China. The world champion and #1-rated player, Viswanathan Anand, is the star; Magnus Carlsen (world #2 by rating), Veselin Topalov (#5), Wang Yue (#10), Vugar Gashimov (#17) and Etienne Bacrot (#29) participate in this double round-robin that runs through October 30.
After that, from November 5-14, we'll have the Tal Memorial in Moscow. There we'll have the world's #3 and #4, Levon Aronian and Vladimir Kramnik, respectively, along with eight other 2700+ players: Eljanov, Grischuk, Mamedyarov, Gelfand, Shirov, Karjakin, Nakamura and Wang Hao.
Right after that there's the World Blitz Championship (November 16-18) in the same location. All the Tal Memorial participants will play, along with Carlsen, Ponomariov, Svidler, Vachier-Lagrave, Nepomniachtchi, Bu Xiangzhi, Grachev, Rauf Mamedov, Savchenko and three players yet to be chosen. (HT on these two Moscow events to Chess Today.)
Reader Comments (1)
I was going through the names in these tournaments and see the lack of Russians. Then it just hit me that not only are the top 3 players in the world not Russian, neither are 5 of the top 6. The only one in the top six is Kramnik an ex-world champion.
[DM: This general diversity at the top isn't news, though it's convenient of you to stop after #6, since #s 7 and 8 both represent Russia. A better exercise is to count up the number of players on the top list from the countries of the former USSR, including emigres Shirov, Gelfand and Kamsky. By my count it's 21 of the top 40, and 14 of the top 20.]