Archive for February 27th, 2009

As part of the Aeroflot Open Chess Festival one more big event was held in Moscow. 165 players took part in the Qualification Tournament for the World Blitz Championship, among them over a hundred grandmasters. For the majority the blitz tournament was part of playing in the Aeroflot Open, but some arrived in Moscow only to qualify for the World Blitz.
Photo report by WGM Yana Melnikova.

Players of the Dragon are traditionally interested in a certain number of “bottlenecks” – i.e. variations which are very critical and which cause them a lot of concern in their games. The lines after 9.0-0-0 have been pretty unpromising. In ChessBase Magazine 114 André Schulz took a long and hard look at the move 12…Nxc3!, which he baptised the Bjerring Variation. Add it to your repertoire.

The King’s Indian has been doing well in Linares. Black hasn’t lost a single game, and today Vassily Ivanchuk scored a victory with it, against Levon Aronian. Vishy Anand used his white game against Alexander Grischuk to experiment with his new 1.d4 repertoire, Grischuk was happy to draw. The other two games were also drawn. Report with annotations by GM Dorian Rogozenco.