Friday 13 February 2015

Open and closed

Of late there seems to be an interesting overlap in high level chess. On a number of occasions there has been a high level open swiss coinciding with a top level closed event. The latest example of this i the Grenke Tournament and Gibraltar. I'm not sure it forces players to make a choice, as much as it provides a nice back up (eg Nakamura did not play Grenke, but won Gibraltar)
But once these event are over, the top players sometime come together. And example of this is Zurich event starting this evening. The tournament has Kramnik, Caruana, Anand, Aronian, Nakamura and Karjakin playing a mixed Classical/Rapid event. The format has 2 points for a win at classical chess and 1 for a win at rapidplay. While the winner is based on score for both events, I wonder if most fns regard the winner of the classical as the 'real' winner.
Tonight kicks off with a blitz event to decide the pairings, while the real action starts tomorrow. The tournament home page is here, and alongside live broadcasting there is live commentary, including a guest appearance from Australia's own Jan (sic) Rogers.

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