Let'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:
What a blindfold tournament playing hall looks like
Name tags of many super strong participants
Wang Yue, often arriving first for the blindfold session
Hungary's no. 1 player Peter Leko
Alexander Morozevich adjusting his pieces
Have we lost another chess player to poker? No... fear not. This shot was taken during the casino party during the first rest day...
...the same day Vassily Ivanchuk turned 40...
...the same age retired Dutch GM Jeroen Piket reached in January this year
The stubborn and stoical central forward of the popular table football
Classical holiday pic: Levon Aronian and Loek van Wely during the second rest day...
Already at the top before the end of the tourney: Levon Aronian
Topping the world rankings, a cool Topalov in another holiday pic
Ivanchuk exploring French flora and fauna
The always cheerful Vlastimil Hort
Catching the moment, as he's not posing too often for photographers: Norway's super grandmaster Magnus Carlsen
Teimour Radjabov in a typical fighting pose
Sergey Karjakin, who managed to beat a by now former Angstgegner, Vassily Ivanchuk, twice at Amber
Topalov in action
Magnus Carlsen talking (or should we say listening) to his father Henrik
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.
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.”