Hello Everyone,
It's going to be the last of the traditional Amber Chess Tournament in Monaco this year. Top players including Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov, Alexander Grischuk, Vasily Ivanchuk, Sergey Karjakin, Boris Gelfand, Hikaru Nakamura, Vugar Gashimov and Anish Giri will play in the 20th Amber Blindfold and Rapid Tournament in Monaco from March 11 to 25, 2011.
The announcement was made in a press release today. The tournament is organised by the Association Max Euwe of chess maecenas Joop van Oosterom, which is based in Monaco. The total prize-fund is € 227,000.
The first Amber tournament was held in Roquebrune, France, in 1992 to celebrate the birth of Mr and Mrs Van Oosterom’s daughter Melody Amber. That first tournament was a rapid event won by Vasily Ivanchuk, the only player to have taken part in all Amber tournaments (and the shared winner, together with Magnus Carlsen, of last year’s edition!).
In the tournament of 1993 the formula was introduced that made ‘Amber’ unique in the chess world: a double round-robin in which the grandmasters play both a rapid and a blindfold game against each other.
The 1993 tournament took place in Monaco, which would become the home of ‘Amber’ till it moved to Nice in 2008. For historical reasons Mr and Mrs Van Oosterom and the Association Max Euwe have chosen to return to Monaco for the farewell edition of this unique chess spectacle.
The Monte-Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort will be an appropriate venue for a tournament that has been the favourite meeting place for the chess elite over the past two decades.
Like in 2008-2010, Macauley Peterson and Peter Doggers of www.chessvibes.com will be providing on-the-spot (live) video coverage of the tournament for the official website.
And, another video from the 2010 edition. (Find more videos at www.chessvibes.com)
From Alexandra Kosteniuk's
www.chessblog.com
Also see her personal blog at
www.chessqueen.com
Too bad the tradition would end.
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