Melody Amber 2009 Preview

The 2009 Melody Amber Rapid and Blindfold tournament is starting on March 14, 2009. I have seen it just referred to as the Amber Tournament, but I've always seen it as Melody Amber, a memorial tournament in Monaco, the mix of Rapid and Blindfold chess is very interesting and something to look forward to watching each year as it always has top rated players.

Here are the 12 Participants:

World Champion Viswanathan Anand (India) 2791
Levon Aronian (Armenia) 2750
Magnus Carlsen (Norway) 2776
Vasily Ivanchuk (Ukraine) 2779
Gata Kamsky (United States) 2725
Sergey Karjakin (Ukraine) 2706
Vladimir Kramnik (Russia) 2759
Peter Leko (Hungary) 2751
Alexander Morozevich (Russia) 2771
Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan) 2760
Veselin Topalov (Bulgaria) 2796
Wang Yue (China) 2739

Every day four sessions will be played, two blindfold sessions and two rapid sessions. The first session starts at 14.30 hrs. The fourth session finishes around 20.00 hrs. (Note: the final round on March 26 starts at 12.30 hrs. March 18 and 23 are rest days.)