2019 Grand Chess Tour Kicks off This Week with Rapid & Blitz in the Ivory Coast
Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 5:14PM
Dennis Monokroussos in 2019 Abidjan, 2019 Grand Chess Tour

The event is listed as starting tomorrow, but those are the preliminaries. The first event of the 2019 Grand Chess Tour sees play begin on Wednesday, May 8 at 3 p.m. GMT in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast. The 10 players will have a single round-robin in rapid, with three games a day, and then they'll contest a double round-robin in blitz over the course of two days.

Here's the lineup, with the players' rapid & blitz ratings in parentheses:

1. Magnus Carlsen (2869, 2954)
2. Hikaru Nakamura (2824, 2934)
3. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (2800, 2933)
4. Sergey Karjakin (2781, 2816)
5. Wesley So (2801, 2744)
6. Ian Nepomniachtchi (2785, 2778)
7. Ding Liren (2760, 2773)
8. Veselin Topalov (2781, 2682)
9. Wei Yi (2698, 2641)
10. Bassem Amin (2617, 2662)

Can anyone stop Magnus Carlsen? (Can? Yes. Will? Probably not.)

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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