Dortmund starts today

At 15.00 CET today the first round of the Dortmund super-tournament takes off with Leko-Kramnik, Carlsen-Jakovenko and Naiditsch-Bacrot. It's yet another six-player, double round-robin and we'll be providing daily coverage.

The Sparkassen Chess-Meeting 2009, part of the Internationalen Dortmunder Schachtage, takes place from July 2nd to 12th, 2009. It will be played for the 37th time. Since 1992, the Sparkassen Chess Meeting has belonged to a very restricted group of annual top events in the chess world (which has become a little bit bigger now with Nanjing and Bazna).

This year six players will participate in a double round robin tournament: Magnus Carlsen (Norway, born in 1990, number 3 on the world rating list, Elo 2772), Dmitry Jakovenko (Russia, 1983, 5, 2760) Vladimir Kramnik (Russia, 1975, 6, 2759) Peter Leko (Hungary, 1979, 7, 2756) Etienne Bacrot (France, 1983, 17, 2721) Arkadij Naiditsch (Germany, 1985, 36, 2697)

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Antti Parkkinen collected some statistics for us. Of this year's players, both Kramnik and Leko will participate for the 15th time. Naiditsch has previously played in Dortmund 6 times, Bacrot and Carlsen once each. Jakovenko is the only first-timer.

Kramnik and Leko have been the players most often seen in Dortmund (14 times each before this year), followed by Michael Adams and Vishy Anand (10 times each). In 2000, the public could witness a silicone brain challenging the top humans. The computer JUNIOR 6 didn't do too bad: it scored 4.5 points out of 9. The experience has not been repeated since in Dortmund.

The most successful player in the history of Dortmund tournaments has been Vladimir Kramnik. He took first or shared first no less than 8 times (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2007). Anand (1996, 2000 and 2004) and Leko (1999, 2002 and 2008) did the same 3 times.

The complete list of winners (outright or shared): 1 1973 Ulf Andersson, Hans-Joachim Hecht and Boris Spassky 2 1974 Victor Ciocaltea and Laszlo Szabo 3 1975 Heikki Westerinen 4 1976 Oleg Romanishin 5 1977 Alexander Kochyev and Jan Smejkal 6 1978 Ulf Andersson 7 1979 Tamaz Giorgadze 8 1980 Raymond Keene 9 1981 Lubomir Ftacnik, Gennadi Kuzmin and Jonathan Speelman 10 1982 Vlastimil Hort 11 1983 Mihai Suba 12 1984 Yehuda Gr?ºnfeld 13 1985 Vlastimil Hort, Stefan Kindermann and Yuri Razuvaev 14 1986 Zoltan Ribli 15 1987 Yuri Balashov 16 1988 Smbat Lputian 17 1989 Efim Geller 18 1990 Alexander Chernin 19 1991 Alexander Chernin and Igor Stohl 20 1992 Vassily Ivanchuk and Garry Kasparov 21 1993 Anatoly Karpov 22 1994 Jeroen Piket 23 1995 Vladimir Kramnik 24 1996 Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik 25 1997 Vladimir Kramnik 26 1998 Michael Adams, Vladimir Kramnik and Peter Svidler 27 1999 Peter Leko 28 2000 Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik 29 2001 Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov 30 2002 Peter Leko 31 2003 Viktor Bologan 32 2004 Viswananthan Anand 33 2005 Arkadij Naiditsch 34 2006 Michael Adams, Vladimir Kramnik and Peter Svidler 35 2007 Vladimir Kramnik 36 2008 Peter Leko 37 2009 ?

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