July Heat

Revving up for dueling supertournaments in the coming days, one old and one new. Dortmund kicks off on July 2nd with Kramnik, Leko, Carlsen, Jakovenko, Bacrot, and Naiditsch. Three former winners there -- don't forget Naiditsch's clear first in 2005. He'll need seven more Dortmund titles to catch up with Vladimir Kramnik's collections. Last year, however, Leko took clear first in the second 'sprint' edition of Dortmund, just seven rounds, with +2. Kramnik, meanwhile, lost twice with his Petroff and finished -1.

This year the format is the overused six-player double all-play-all, which limits the influx of new blood but cuts down on hotel and travel costs. The purity of eliminating color imbalance is a nice feature, but I'd be happy to leave this stodgy format to Linares. Instead it's spreading like H1N1. At least we get ten rounds of action instead of the mere seven rounds as in the last few years.

Nice to see Jakovenko here, befitting his new status as world #5 on the new July rating list. The Grand Prix has been keeping him busy enough, but he hasn't had much in the way of invites to traditional events. I guess he's lucky that Kramnik doesn't really count as another Russian in Dortmund since he basically owns the joint. It'll be interesting to see Big Vlad in action since he hasn't played a classical game since his mediocre Olympiad performance last November. He was in devastating form in rapid chess in Baku last month.

Rounds begin at 9am EDT and I'll be kicking things off live on ICC Chess.FM with Larry Christiansen for rounds one and two.

Then on the 7th the inaugural Donostia-San Sebastian chess festival begins in Spain with no fewer than four round-robin events at the same time. Loek van Wely is in the B group! The official site just popped up here. Players in the top group, aka the "Donostia 2016 European Cultural City" tournament are: Karpov, Svidler, Nakamura, Movsesian, Kasimjanov, Ponomariov, Vachier-Lagrave, Vallejo Pons, Granda Zuñiga, San Segundo. (San Sebastian is a candidate city to be the 2016 European capital of culture, one of the reasons they are hosting this chess festival.) Pictures will be at this Flickr account, currently stocked with pics of the locale and older photos of the players. There's even a Twitter account, so add @donostiachess to your Tweetdeck for regular updates if you're into that sort of thing.