World Blitz Championship Day1
Now that the serious business of the 2009 Tal Memorial is finished in Moscow, the players can relax and have some fun in the World Blitz Championship.
That's the theory anyway, but in practice a world title is still a world title, and these superb competitors will all be playing just as hard to win the blitz championship, even though rating points aren't at stake (or perhaps because rating points aren't at stake!)
The ten players from the Tal Memorial are joined in the blitz event by a mix of qualifiers and special guests (see the standings below for full details), to make a wonderful line-up of 22 top-class players!
The format is a double round-robin, so there will be an energy-sapping 42 rounds of blitz chess in total, played over three days. The rate of play is 3 minutes per game, plus a 2 second increment per move.
The first 14 games took place today, and provided plenty of upsets and excitement for the audience! With so many games being played, it's hard to pick just a few for this news report, so I would urge everyone to visit this page which has the pgn records of all the games played. A few selected games can be found further below.
At 39 years of age, the former "Lightning Kid", world champion Vishy Anand, may not be a kid anymore, but his rapid chess skills are still extraordinary and helped him to establish a lead on 12/14 at the end of day one. Magnus Carlsen was in hot pursuit in second place with 10/14 despite losses to women's world champion Alexandra Kosteniuk and former world champion Anatoly Karpov. Speaking of Karpov, he also had an excellent day to stand third so far on 9/14.
The full standings after the first day:
| 1 | Anand, Viswanathan | IND | 12 |
| 2 | Carlsen, Magnus | NOR | 10 |
| 3 | Karpov, Anatoly | RUS | 9 |
| 4 | Kramnik, Vladimir | RUS | 8.5 |
| 5 | Grischuk, Alexander | RUS | 8.5 |
| 6 | Ponomariov, Ruslan | UKR | 8 |
| 7 | Bareev, Evgeny | RUS | 8 |
| 8 | Karjakin, Sergey | UKR | 8 |
| 9 | Ivanchuk, Vassily | UKR | 7.5 |
| 10 | Svidler, Peter | RUS | 7.5 |
| 11 | Aronian, Levon | ARM | 7.5 |
| 12 | Leko, Peter | HUN | 7 |
| 13 | Gashimov, Vugar | AZE | 6.5 |
| 14 | Morozevich, Alexander | RUS | 6.5 |
| 15 | Polgar, Judit | HUN | 6 |
| 16 | Naiditsch, Arkadij | GER | 6 |
| 17 | Dominguez Perez, Leinier | CUB | 5.5 |
| 18 | Jakovenko, Dmitry | RUS | 5 |
| 19 | Gelfand, Boris | ISR | 4.5 |
| 20 | Tkachiev, Vladislav | FRA | 4.5 |
| 21 | Kosteniuk, Alexandra | RUS | 4 |
| 22 | Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar | AZE | 4 |
Detailed results from each round can be found here, together with full tournament tables.
Days 2 and 3 take place on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, with games starting at 3pm local time in Moscow. The live broadcast of the games is available from the official site. The important links are in the box a little way down the page in the left-hand column, with the live games link being marked with "ONLINE".
