For more than a decade, the Aeroflot Open was a traditional open event, and an incredibly strong one. Whether for financial reasons or because the sponsors found the old format "boring, miserable, and useless", this year's event is a multi-stage tournament featuring the semi-blitz, semi-rapid time control of 15 minutes per game with 10 second increments. (There's nothing wrong with fast time controls, but did they have to replace a great classical event to do this?)
Tuesday and Wednesday featured the Open component of the tournament. 257 players participated, and the top 32 qualified (full results here).
Today, there was an unrelated blitz tournament, won by Ian Nepomniachtchi with 15.5 out of 18. Peter Svidler finished second with 14.5, and Alexander Grischuk came in third with 14.
Tomorrow, the field of 32 qualifiers will be pared down to eight finalists, who will be joined the next two days by eight invitees: Grischuk, Svidler, Dmitry Andreikin, Sergey Karjakin, Nepomniachtchi, Wang Hao, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov and someone else not named on the website.
It should be a fun tournament, but one hopes that Dortmund will not take the winner of a glorified blitz tournament as a qualifier for their classical event.