2011 Bilbao Chess Grand Slam
The Bilbao Chess Master Final will begin on September 26th with the first round. Six of the world’s top Grandmasters with take part in a partnership event that will be divided between two venues… Brazil and Spain. The field features the 2800 trio of Magnus Carlsen, World Champion Viswanathan Anand and Levon Aronian plus World Championship qualifier Vassily Ivanchuk. Hikaru Nakamura and Francisco Vallejo-Pons round out the double round robin event which will invoke the Sofia Rules which includes the modified scoring of three points for a win and one point for a draw. The primary time control will be 40 moves in 90 minutes followed by 60 minutes with 10 seconds increment.
September 25th-October 1st, 2011 (São Paulo, Brazil) October 6th-October 11th, 2011 (Bilbao, Spain) |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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#
|
Name
|
Title
|
Federation
|
Flag
|
Rating
|
| 1 | Carlsen, Magnus | GM | Norway |
 |
2823 |
| 2 | Anand, Viswanathan | GM | India |
 |
2817 |
| 3 | Aronian, Levon | GM | Armenia |
 |
2805 |
| 4 | Ivanchuk, Vassily | GM | Ukraine |
 |
2765 |
| 5 | Nakamura, Hikaru | GM | USA |
 |
2753 |
| 6 | Vallejo-Pons, Francisco | GM | Spain |
 |
2716 |
Games: https://www.thechessdrum.net/palview5/grandslam2011.pgn
I’ve never seen the Sofia rules before. Interesting. In normal scoring, it looks like the standings would be the same except there wouldn’t be a tie-break for the 2 leaders: Carlsen 6.0, Ivanchuck 5.5, Anand, Nakamura and Aronian 5.0, and Vallejo-Pons 3.5. Carlsen, Anand, Nakamura, and Aronian each had 6 draws while Ivanchuk only had 3. It seems the motivation for Sofia is to punish draws and it did punish Carlsen because his 6.0 by normal rules was a 15 by Sofia rules and Chucky’s 5.5 was a 15–forcing a tiebreak.