Last year's inaugural edition of the Sinquefield Cup had four players: Magnus Carlsen (not yet the world champion), Levon Aronian, Hikaru Nakamura and Gata Kamsky. This year the tournament will expand to six players and will actually have a higher average rating than last year. Kamsky won't be back this time, but in his place Fabiano Caruana (please stay!), Veselin Topalov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave will participate in this double round-robin, bringing the average rating to a whopping 2802.
The tournament goes from August 27 through September 7, and since we're all going to forget about the tournament with the Olympiad going on you might want to bookmark the website now, for future reference. Speaking of which, why is the St. Louis chess club's website so consistently strange in its design? Rex Sinquefield is as rich as Croesus and has built a beautiful facility for chess in St. Louis. Thanks to his work St. Louis is the capital of chess in the United States of America. So one would expect a top-class website, organized in a logical and aesthetically pleasing way. So...is there a dedicated website for the tournament? Nope. Okay then, we can at least get there directly from the St. Louis club's website, right? Kind of - there is a banner at the bottom of the page that links to some useful information about the tournament. But according to the press release I was sent, the official page is - or rather, can be found - on the U.S. Chess Championships website. Very strange.