Amber 2009 stronger than ever

The 18th Amber Blindfold and Rapid tournament, organized by the Association Max Euwe in Monaco, takes place from March 14 (first round) to March 26 (last round) at the five-star hotel Palais de la Mediterran?©e, splendidly located on the famous Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France. The total prize-fund is ‚Ǩ 216,000 and this year‚Äôs field is stronger than ever with all the world‚Äôs best players taking part.

The twelve participants are (in alphabetical order): World Champion Viswanathan Anand (India), Levon Aronian (Armenia), Magnus Carlsen (Norway), Vasily Ivanchuk (Ukraine), Gata Kamsky (United States), Sergey Karjakin (Ukraine), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia), Peter Leko (Hungary), Alexander Morozevich (Russia), Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan), Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) and Wang Yue (China).

Every day four sessions will be played, two blindfold sessions and two rapid sessions. The first session starts at 14.30 hrs. The fourth session finishes around 20.00 hrs. (Note: the final round on March 26 starts at 12.30 hrs. March 18 and 23 are rest days.) Official website: www.amberchess2009.com.

Like last year, both Macauley Peterson and yours truly have been invited to provide daily videos for the official website, so you can expect many videos again, like the ones we did last year: