The Aeroflot Open in Moscow is one of the strongest open tournaments every year, if not the strongest, and it comes with the added prize of sending the winner into the Dortmund super-tournament later in the year. The young Vietnamese grandmaster Le Quang Liem has won Aeroflot the past two years and is playing again (I hope Dortmund invites him back in any case - he has played very well the past two years, taking second to Ponomariov in 2010 and second to Kramnik in 2011). Other elite GMs in the hunt are Fabiano Caruana, Ian Nepomniachtchi and Evgeny Tomashevsky, and the 86-player field (for the A-section) includes 79 grandmasters in all.
It's a nine-round event that started on Tuesday and continues through Wednesday, February 15. After two rounds there are five players with perfect scores: Evgeny Alekseev, Denis Khismatullin, Sergei Zhigalko, Abhijeet Gupta and Maxim Rodshtein.