Thursday 22 October 2009

European Teams Championship

You know you have too many chess friends on facebook when their status updates begin to look like a tournament crosstable. A case in point is a number of posts flagging the 2009 European Teams Championship which starts today. The event has 38 teams representing 37 countries (host country Serbia gets 2 teams) and unlike the Olympiad, there is very little "filler". Even the bottom seeded team, Monaco, has GM Igor Efimov on board 1. Interestingly they also have former FIDE Treasurer, Willy Iclicki as their board 4.
Most of the top teams have brought very strong players (Svidler, Topalov, Aronian etc) although Norway lost Carlsen at short notice.
The website for the tournament is http://www.eurons2009.com/eng.htm and hopefully there will be live broadcasts of the games (implied from the website although I haven't found the link yet).

No comments: