Carlsen top seed in Bazna this year

Magnus Carlsen is the top seed of this year's Kings Tournament in Bazna, Romania. The 4th edition "replaces the MTel Masters in the Grand Slam circuit", according to the organizers. Besides Carlsen, the field has Gelfand, Nisipeanu, Ponomariov, Radjabov and Wang Yue.

Last week we received the following, brief press release from the organizers of the Kings Tournament.

The Kings Tournament will take place in the period 14-25 June in Bazna, Romania. This year’s participants are Magnus Carlsen, Wang Yue, Boris Gelfand, Teimour Radjabov, Ruslan Ponomariov and Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu. The playing modus is double-round robin event with 2 free days. Sofia (anti-draw) rules apply.

The Kings Tournament replaces the Sofia M-Tel Masters in the Grand Slam circuit of this year.

The Romanian Gas Company „Romgaz” is sponsoring the event, while the main organizer of Kings Tournament is „The chess club Elisabeta Polihroniade”.

And so after a relatively long period of inactivity (as far as classical chess is concerned), world number one Magnus Carlsen will return to the chess board in June. Fans eagerly await his new tournament in Romania, the first after Corus, which will be another 6-player, double round-robin, like last year. Then it was Vassily Ivanchuk who finished first with a 7/10 score, ahead of Boris Gelfand (6/10), Teimour Radjabov & Alexei Shirov (5.5/10) and Gata Kamsy & Liviu-Dieter Nisipeanu (3/10).

Members of the Grand Slam Chess Association had been talking with the Romanian organizers for a while about inclusion in the Grand Slam, and we can assume that the cancellation of the MTel Masters has speeded up this process. With Carlsen in the field this brings the risk of an interesting complication. After Nanjing and Corus, the Norwegian might also win this one. In that case the organizers of the Grand Slam Final Masters in Bilbao/Shanghai, who already invited Carlsen, will need to look at the best numbers 2 for deciding on their other invitations.

Update April 20th: playing dates are 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24 and 25 June. The inclusion in the Grand Slam has been agreed for this year. In Sofia the members of the Grand Slam Chess Assocation will meet with the Romanian organizers to talk about further cooperation.