Tal Memorial 2011

This field sure looks very interesting, first the Grand Slam final with an average Elo of 2780 in September/October, and then this event with a measly 2775 average in November, some great tournaments to look forward to the upcoming months:

Viswanathan Anand (India, 2817)
Magnus Carlsen (Norway, 2823)
Levon Aronian (Armenia, 2807)
Vladimir Kramnik (Russia, 2791)
Sergey Karjakin (Russia, 2772)
Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine, 2765)
Hikaru Nakamura (USA, 2753)
Boris Gelfand (Israel, 2746)
Peter Svidler (Russia, 2740)
Ian Nepomniachtchi (Russia, 2718)

http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/participants-tal-memorial-announced

There's London in December as well, all three 2800+ players will face each other three months in a row in extremely strong tournaments. And then there's Wijk in January after that, I guess most top players will be there as usual, and Linares has been said to return in March. Looks like an unusually tough schedule for the top players and it sure will be interesting to see what the results will be.

Since Tal Memorial starts today it's interesting to look at predictions. The opinions of Mark Glukhovsky, editor of "64" and commentator at the tournament, can be found at http://www.whychess.org/node/2989

About Carlsen's previous Tal Memorials: "he’s not only failed to win, but also failed even to fight for victory (in 2009 he finished half a point back, but that was only thanks to wins in the last two rounds). Therefore Carlsen doesn’t usually perform very well in Moscow"

Carlsen did perform considerably better than his rating in Tal Memorial 2009 as well as in 2007, his two latest starts in the tournament (when he still was just 16 and 18 years old). It could also be worth mentioning that he played with fever in 2009, was close to withdrawing, and still finished 0.5 from first. So he hasn't done too badly.

"Carlsen’s phenomenal results are largely based on the fact that he scores almost 100% against grandmasters who are significantly inferior to him in terms of class"

Topalov, Ivanchuk and Radjabov have been fighting for #5 lately (with ratings around 2775) and Carlsen has a huge plus against them. As against Nakamura, and he has a plus also against Karjakin, even against Aronian. Still his results are "largely based" on his scores against "significantly inferior" players? He hasn't exactly done better against Sjugirov, McShane, Jobava, Vachier-Lagrave, Nepomniachtchi, Giri, etc than against Topalov, Ivanchuk, Radjabov, Aronian and Nakamura :-)

"Aronian and Kramnik strike me as having better chances of victory. Both grandmasters are in excellent form"

Carlsen won the very strong Grand Slam final as well as his tournaments before that, so I don't know if his form really is worse than Aronian's (who didn't have a plus score in the Grand Slam final Carlsen won and survived a couple of lost positions in the European Team Championship) and Kramnik's (who declined the Grand Slam final to play the much weaker Univé after finishing behind Svidler and Morozevich in the Russian Superfinal). But of course it's difficult to win such a strong event not only for Carlsen, especially with more blacks than whites.

On Gelfand: "The fact that his rating is the second last in the tournament has no significance whatsoever. Even the most “statistically dependent” chess fans have already realised the scale of his chess talent"

Any player that is close to the top ten is of course very talented, but Gelfand has never won a top tournament after playing in them for more than 20 years and I don't think this will be the first time it happens. He lost against Jakovenko recently and the opposition here is stronger.

And about Nakamura: "it’s not his level"

Nakamura has played some excellent chess in Wijk and Bilbao this year. Last year he missed first place in Tal Memorial after a blunder against Grischuk. If he was a bit unlucky in Bilbao (the unnecessary time loss in a better position against Vallejo) and Tal Memorial 2010 (he probably wins that endgame he had against Grischuk 99 times of 100) it could be his turn to win this tournament.