Tal Memorial starts tomorrow started - LIVE IM/GM COMMENTARY at ChessVibes

We received lots of positive feedback on our coverage of the Pearl Spring tournament (Nanjing), and this encouraged us to do even better during the Tal Memorial. With Anand, Aronian, Carlsen, Kramnik, Leko, Gelfand, Ivanchuk, Morozevich, Svidler and Ponomariov it's the strongest tournament of 2009, and it starts tomorrow. For the first time we'll be providing live IM/GM commentary throughout the tournament. Update: pairings added

The Tal Memorial takes place November 4-18 in Moscow, Russia. The Memorial will consist of two events: a category 21 round-robin and the World Blitz Championship. In the round-robin Viswanathan Anand (India, 2788), Levon Aronian (Armenia, 2786), Magnus Carlsen (Norway, 2801), Vladimir Kramnik (Russia, 2772), Peter Leko (Hungary, 2752), Boris Gelfand (Israel, 2758), Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine, 2739) Alexander Morozevich (Russia, 2750), Peter Svidler (Russia, 2754) and Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine, 2739) compete.

The World Blitz Championship will be held 16, 17 and 18 November. This event tournament will be attended by 22 GMs, including the round-robin participants and invited players A. Karpov, A. Kosteniuk, L. Dominguez, A. Grischuk, D. Jakovenko, J.Polgar and six winners of the qualifying blitz "Aeroflot Open" - S. Karjakin, V.Gashimov, S. Mamedyarov, E. Bareev, V. Tkachiev and Zhou Jianchao.

The first four rounds of the round-robin will take place in hotel "National" on November 5, 6, 7 and 8. Rounds 5-9 take place in the Main Department Store GUM on Red Square. The time control is the classic 40 moves in 2 hours, then 20 moves in 1 hour and then 15 minutes plus 30 seconds increment to finish the game. The rounds begin daily at 15:00 Moscow time which is 13:00 CET.

Live commentary

As one of the strongest tournaments ever held in chess history, the Tal Memorial is an excellent moment to introduce live commentary, we figured, and so this is what you can enjoy as of tomorrow. At our special live page www.chessvibes.com/live (how easy to remember is that?) the games and, more importantly, analysis by IMs and GMs will be provided. You will be able to follow the comments and analysis in the game viewer you're used to, and besides, you'll also find a chat window below the board. This way you can talk about the games with other visitors, and besides, this way the IM/GM will be able to answer questions from the audience every now and then.

Our team

Our schedule for the Tal Memorial:

Thursday, November 5th, 2009		Round 1		IM Merijn van Delft
Friday, November 6th, 2009		Round 2		GM Sipke Ernst
Saturday, November 7th, 2009		Round 3		IM Robert Ris
Sunday, November 8th, 2009		Round 4		IM Robert Ris
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009		Round 5		IM Merijn van Delft
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009		Round 6		GM Dimitri Reinderman
Thursday, November 12th, 2009		Round 7		GM Wouter Spoelman
Friday, November 13th, 2009		Round 8		GM Dimitri Reinderman
Saturday, November 14th, 2009		Round 9		IM Merijn van Delft

As you know by now, at ChessVibes we like to experiment. Hopefully you will enjoy our live coverage - we're pretty excited about it ourselves and we'll do our very best to make the Tal Memorial a great experience for our visitors.

Update: full schedule (now confirmed):