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Amber: the last word

PeterDoggers
| 0 | Chess Event Coverage
Aronian on topLet's return one more time to the 2009 Amber Blindfold and Rapid tournament, to present you the final two videos and a small selection of photos that we hadn't published before. Enjoy!

During the Amber tournament we took many, many photos but most of them were never actually published here on ChessVibes. Back home we finally found the time to sort them out and upload them to Flickr. Here's a selection, and below the photos you can find the video player including our last two videos:

playinghall

What a blindfold tournament playing hall looks like



nameplates

Name tags of many super strong participants



wangyue2

Wang Yue, often arriving first for the blindfold session



leko

Hungary's no. 1 player Peter Leko



morozevich

Alexander Morozevich adjusting his pieces



carlsen_poker

Have we lost another chess player to poker? No... fear not. This shot was taken during the casino party during the first rest day...



ivanchukbirthday

...the same day Vassily Ivanchuk turned 40...



piket

...the same age retired Dutch GM Jeroen Piket reached in January this year



tablefootball

The stubborn and stoical central forward of the popular table football



aronian-loek

Classical holiday pic: Levon Aronian and Loek van Wely during the second rest day...



klooster

...a trip to ?éle Saint-Honorat with its fortified monastery of Abbey L?©rins



aronian-on-top

Already at the top before the end of the tourney: Levon Aronian



topalovsunglasses

Topping the world rankings, a cool Topalov in another holiday pic



ivanchuk

Ivanchuk exploring French flora and fauna



hort

The always cheerful Vlastimil Hort



carlsen

Catching the moment, as he's not posing too often for photographers: Norway's super grandmaster Magnus Carlsen



radjabov

Teimour Radjabov in a typical fighting pose



karjakiun

Sergey Karjakin, who managed to beat a by now former Angstgegner, Vassily Ivanchuk, twice at Amber



topalovmoves

Topalov in action



carlsen-henrik

Magnus Carlsen talking (or should we say listening) to his father Henrik



shadow

Another Radjabov one we especially like




In the video player two last videos have been added after round 11: one summarizing that last round and one looking back at this year's tournament with comments by Aronian, Anand, Kramnik, Topalov, Radjabov and a big interview with Vlastimil Hort.

PeterDoggers
Peter Doggers

Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”

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