2012 Tal Memorial (Moscow, Russia)

While the 2012 edition is not as strong as last year’s field (quartet of 2800s), the world’s top five players in the world will pawn off in Moscow, Russia. Both Viswanathan Anand and Boris Gelfand will obviously be missing from this year’s competition, but Magnus Carlen, Levon Aronian, Vladimir Kramnik, Teimour Radjabov and Hikaru Nakamura will grace the field. Italian champion Fabiano Caruana and Alexander Grischuk will add to the star power of the field. Evgeny Tomashevsky and Luke McShane round out the field.

This year there is a unique method of devising the pairings. A blitz tournament (with a separate prize fund) will determine the pairing numbers. With the winner getting #1, second getting #2 and so on. The top five in the blitz will get five whites and four blacks, but tiebreaks will give the advantage to those having played more games with black. Thus, the perception of playing the majority whites may be a mere illusion.

Note: Alexander Morozevich won the blitz tournament with superior tiebreaks over Magnus Carlsen. Morozevich beat Carlsen in their head-to-head encounter.

2012 TAL MEMORIAL June 7th-19th, 2012 (Moscow, Russia)
Players
#	Name	Title	Federation	Flag	Rating
1	Carlsen, Magnus	GM	Norway		2835
2	Aronian, Levon	GM	Armenia		2825
3	Kramnik, Vladimir	GM	Russia		2801
4	Radjabov, Teimour	GM	Azerbaijan		2784
6	Nakamura, Hikaru	GM	USA		2775
7	Morozevich, Alexander	GM	Russia		2769
8	Grischuk, Alexander	GM	Russia		2761
9	Tomashevsky, Evgeny	GM	Russia		2739
10	McShane, Luke	GM	England		2706
Official Site (Russian)

All PGN Games: TWIC