Exciting start Tal Memorial
On the first day of the Tal Memorial, the players showed tremendous fighting spirit. In an excellent first round in Moscow, Kramnik, Morozevich and Ivanchuk won their White games.The traditional chess festival "M. Tal Memorial" takes place 17-31 August at the GUM Exhibition Hall, located very close to the Red Square, in Moscow, Russia.It consists of two parts: a classical chess round robin tournament of ten top GMs, viz. Vladimir Kramnik, Alexander Morozevich, Evgeny Alekseev, Vassily Ivanchuk, Alexei Shirov, Gata Kamsky, Ruslan Ponomariov, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Peter Leko and Boris Gelfand.
And then there's the Tal Cup Blitz tournament (qualification August 27 and 28, final August 29 and 30) with e.g. Magnus Carlsen and Anatoly Karpov.The classical tournament is played with the FIDE time control, i.e. 2 hours for the first 40 moves, 1 hour for the next 20 moves and another 15 minutes for the rest of the game with an increment of 30 seconds per move starting with move 61.



The Europe-Echecs video team travelled from Sochi to Moscow and will cover the Tal Memorial as well: