This year the Sparkassen Chess Meeting will be held between the 2nd and 12th of July at the quaint old city of Dortmund in Germany. There will be eight Grandmasters competing for the spoils at the 36th Dortmund International chess tournament.
GM Peter Leko is the title defender from last year , when he finished with a +2 result in a field comprising of the then World Champion GM Vladimir Kramnik & GM Vassily Ivanchuk among others. Leko has been very consistent at this torunament, finishing third in the 2007 edition of this tournament. However this year the battle may be tougher with the inclusion of the Norwegian chess sensation 'the Mozart of chess' - Magnus Carlsen.
However, in my view, the clear favourite this year will be GM Vladimir Kramnik. He showed signs of recovering from his disastrous battle for the world championship with GM Vishwanathan Anand of India at the 'Battle for Bonn' event last year, with a joint second position finish in the
18th Amber blindfold and rapid chess Tournament held from March 14 to March 26th 2009 in Nice, France.
Apart from the above mentioned Super GM's (excepting Ivanchuk), this year's tournament also includes players like the World No 7,
GM Dmitry Jakovenko, who has been consistently performing well over the past few years, without being considered part of the Elite group of chess players. This is his first big opportunity to make a mark at one of the oldest and prestigious chess tournaments. Jakovenko could also become the highest rated chess player from Russia, if he is able to finish with higher points than Kramnik (who without playing any rated events managed to reach 4th position in the Fide World chess ratings list).
GM Etienne Bacrot and GM
Arkadij Naiditsch are the other two competitors this year. All the players are rated above the magical ELO Mark of 2700, making this a very strong event.
WHEN IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer played a fascinating match with the then reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and defeated him in one of the games, the latter acquired the dubious distinction of becoming the first grandmaster to have been defeated by a computer. Later the grandmaster admitted that he had learnt a lot from Deep Blue as it "thought" differently from humans.
Back in their office, the designers of Deep Blue must have been amused by the statement, for they knew that Deep Blue often makes some silly chess moves, and actually it does not "understand" chess at all! This is a perplexing thought, if Deep Blue did not understand chess, how did it defeat one of the great players of all time?
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Asked who was the greatest chess player in the world, Fischer once replied: “It’s nice to be modest, but it would be stupid if I did not tell the truth. It is Fischer.”
Fischer, a former child prodigy who once said he liked to watch his opponents squirm and who had become an Icelandic citizen, became world champion by beating the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky under the glare of Cold War publicity in Reykjavik in 1972.
The brilliant but eccentric American abandoned his title without moving a pawn by failing to meet a deadline to defend his crown in Manila in 1975. World chess authorities reluctantly awarded it to challenger Anatoly Karpov of the erstwhile Soviet Union, who was to hold it for the next decade.
Fischer withdrew into himself, not playing in public and living on little more than the magic of his name, although millions of enthusiasts regarded him as the king of chess.
He made headlines and fell foul of US authorities when he came out of seclusion to play his old rival Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, at a time when the country was the target of sanctions during Belgrade’s war with breakaway republics.
He vanished after the match, for which he won $3 million, and resurfaced only after the September 11, 2001, attacks. In an interview with a Philippine radio station, Fischer praised the strikes and said he wanted to see America “wiped out”.
One commentator said there was one constant through his life’s exceptional peaks and troughs — his “running battle with the rest of the human race”.
