Tal Memorial 2009

The Tal Memorial 2009 will be one of the strongest tournaments of recent times. With 8 of the world's top 10 participating. To win this tournament will be an incredible feat. Let's just hope that the players come to fight. Usually in a tournament this strong there is an very high draw percentage. Morozevich, Ivanchuk and Carlsen will come to play. It will be hard to predict the mindset of the other players. Anand has an upcoming World Championship title defense, Kramnik can win this tournament if he decides he wants to, or you can expect an equal to +1 score if he is just looking for an equal result. Aronian is the man to beat lately. Gelfand, Leko, and Svidler you can expect many draws from an they will be happy with and equal score. Ponomariov has not been playing enough chess lately to be able to compete in such a strong event. I will be very surprised if one of the top 4 seeds do not win this event. If Carlsen can pull off another performance like he did in Nanjing, he will be without doubt the world #1. 


Viswanathan Anand 2788
Levon Aronian 2773
Magnus Carlsen 2772
Vladimir Kramnik 2772
Peter Leko 2762
Vassily Ivanchuk 2756
Boris Gelfand 2756
Alexander Morozevich 2750
Peter Svidler 2741
Ruslan Ponomariov 2741