Two top tournaments in early July

In the first week of July two very strong tournaments will take off: the traditional Sparkassen Chess Meeting in Dortmund (this year a double round-robin with Carlsen, Kramnik, Leko, Jakovenko, Bacrot and Naiditsch) and a new kid on the block: the first edition of an international top tournament in San Sebasti?°n, Spain with Movsesian, Svidler, Ponomariov, Nakamura, Kasimzhanov, Vallejo, Vachier-Lagraeve, Karpov (!), Granda and San Segundo.

This year the Sparkassen Chess Meeting will be held from July 2nd to 12th in Dortmund, Germany. It was always quite a short tournament, with 8 players and 7 rounds, but for this year the organizers have chosen the "MTel format" which was also applied at the first Nanjing super tournament: a 6-player, double round-robin.

This year the tournament has four players from the world's top 10 and all participants are above 2699: Magnus Carlsen (NOR, 2770), Vladimir Kramnik (RUS, 2759), Jakovenko (RUS, 2753), Peter Leko (HUN, 2751), Etienne Bacrot (FRA, 2728) and Arkadij Naiditsch (GER, 2700). Average: 2744. Category: 20.

This information hasn't been offically confirmed yet but a press release (in German) was published at the website Schach-Ticker, who also seem to have started their own blog and published the press release as a first blog post. Nothing yet at the tournament website, though.

The field of the new top tournament in the Basque town of San Sebasti?°n has been confirmed: - Sergei Movsesian (SVK, 2747), Peter Svidler (RUS, 2726), Ruslan Ponomariov (UKR, 2726), Hikaru Nakamura (USA, 2700), Rustam Kasimdzhanov (UZB, 2695), Francisco Vallejo (ESP, 2688), Maxime Vachier-Lagraeve (FRA, 2684), Anatoly Karpov (RUS, 2644), Julio Granda (PER, 2610) and Pablo San Segundo (ESP, 2560). Average: 2687. Category: 18. This single round-robin will be held July 6th-16th in the same playing hall that saw the famous 1911 San Sebasti?°n tournament won by Capablanca over Rubinstein, Vidmar, Marshall, and Tarrasch.