GM Emanuel Berg

From Chessdom: GM Emanuel Berg will be top seeded in the main tournament. He will have strong local opposition from GM David Howell, GM Gawain Jones, and GM Sturt Conquest. Among other of the strong international participants are GM Valerij Neverov (current Hastings Masters Champion and winner of Hastings Chess 2008), GM Igor Kurnosov, GM Daniel Gormally, and GM Milos Pavlovic. Top woman player of the event will be IM Jovanka Houska. The Hastings tournament will take place from 12-28-2008 to 1-5-2009. See the Chessdom article or the Official Site for the Event at Hastings.

Here is the most recent summary of the chess tournaments in Elista and Nanjing from Chessbase:


I find these graphs to be extremely helpful and seamless and beautiful to use on the blog from chessbase. I'd love to know exactly how these graphs are generated (it doesn't seem like a standard chess software creation and I've only seen it from chessbase). It's very cool and I'm happy to support this sort of technology. graphing software for tournament reports is something we need in blogging.

thanks to the research done by Chessdom.com we now know the full history of Linares chess tournament winners. The Linares tournament started in 1978.

1978 Jaan Eslon
1979 Larry Christiansen
1981 Anatoly Karpov / Larry Christiansen
1983 Boris Spassky
1985 Ljubomir Ljubojevic / Robert Hübner
1988 Jan Timman
1989 Vassily Ivanchuk
1990 Garry Kasparov
1991 Vassily Ivanchuk
1992 Garry Kasparov
1993 Garry Kasparov
1994 Anatoly Karpov
1995 Vassily Ivanchuk
1997 Garry Kasparov
1998 Viswanathan Anand
1999 Garry Kasparov
2000 Vladimir Kramnik / Garry Kasparov
2001 Garry Kasparov
2002 Garry Kasparov
2003 Péter Lékó / Vladimir Kramnik
2004 Vladimir Kramnik
2005 Garry Kasparov / Veselin Topalov
2006 Levon Aronian
2007 Viswanathan Anand
* 2008 Viswanathan Anand

Source: Chessbase

After recovering over a weekend flu-like bug I'm back here to give you a report just in time for the end of the Olympiad.

The USA mens and womens team has done incredibly well ... a Bronze medal to each. I was hoping for a Gold medal for the women but that never came about. The men would have done better has Gregory Kaidanov been playing on the men's team rather than training the women but I think the women played much better with his help so it's a trade off.

At any rate, I'm proud of our teams at this olympiad and they deserve a hero's welcome home!!

Don't forget to read the Chessbase pictorial report