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Kramnik leads half-way at Tal Blitz

PeterDoggers
| 0 | Chess Event Coverage
After the first half of the huge Tal Blitz tournament in Moscow, Vladimir Kramnik leads with 11 points out of 17 games. Tal Memorial winner Ivanchuk, defeated Anand in the tiebreak final last year, who is defending his blitz title, is shared second with "wild card" Magnus Carlsen. Tomorrow the second half will be played.

Although officially it's not the blitz world championship anymore (this will be organised in Kazachstan later this year), the Tal Blitz 2008 did attract a huge amount of world famous grandmasters again. The qualifying stage, played August 27-28, had the following final table:

[TABLE=368]

The first 14 qualified for the final stage, The first 4, plus the 10 participants of the Tal Memorial, qualified for the final stage, an 18-player round-robin played in two legs: 17 rounds today and 17 rounds tomorrow. Besides the 14 qualifiers, Anatoly Karpov, Magnus Carlsen, Peter Svidler and Vladimir Tkachiev got special invitations.

After the first 17 games it's Vladimir Kramnik who took a slim lead of just half a point - he's followed by Carlsen and Ivanchuk:

[TABLE=369]

Below you can replay all games of the first leg, played today:





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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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