BOTW: 2015.06.15
Norway Chess 2015
June 15-26
Norway Chess 2015 is the first of three events in the new Grand Chess Tour. The others are the Sinquefield Cup (Aug 21 - Sept 3) and the London Chess Classic (Dec 3-15).
Players:
World Champion Magnus Carlsen
#2 Fabiano Caruana
#3 Viswanathan Anand
#4 Hikaru Nakamura
#5 Veselin Topalov
#7 Alexander Grischuk
#8 Levon Aronian
#10 Anish Giri
#28 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave
#61 Jon Ludvig Hammer (won 6 GM RR qualifier)
In addition to the usual top-level live commentary and player post-mortems, Norway Chess will experiment with a "confession box", a sound-proofed booth where any player can choose to talk to a video feed during their games!?
Commentary
Live commentary from Norway with New in Chess editor Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam & GM Jan Gustafsson (covering Monday's blitz too, with Garry Kasparov chipping in)
Commentary from St.Louis by GM Maurice Ashley & WGM Jennifer Shahade & GM Yasser Seirawan
http://grandchesstour.com/live-norway-chess-2015
Homepage
http://2015.norwaychess.com/
Norway Chess 2015 is the first of three events in the new Grand Chess Tour. The others are the Sinquefield Cup (Aug 21 - Sept 3) and the London Chess Classic (Dec 3-15).
http://grandchesstour.com/
Gardening Norway Style
Norway Chess 2015 begins with a blitz tournament in a garden (invitation only). If you want to feel like you're in Norway, there's a 9 minute segment on the Arctic Alpine Botanic Gardens in Tromso -- which hosted the 2014 Olympiad -- as part of episode 9 of the BBC series "Around the World in 80 Gardens", which you can see on the TVO website until July 3, 2015.
The Tromso segment starts at 50min.
http://tvo.org/video/213519/around-world-80-gardens-episode-9
Alekhine on chess.com
GM Jeremy Silman has produced a fantastic seven-part series on Alekhine for chess.com. Each part has biography, photos, anecdotes, gossip, and between 10 and 19 interactive puzzles based on Alekhine's games. If packaged together this would be worth buying for Alekhine fans, but it's all free! Note: some of the puzzles have more than one solution, but the chess.com interface will treat all but one of them as "incorrect", so don't get discouraged if your solution is rejected at first -- the fully annotated explanations might list it as an alternative.
Of course, you should start with part 1, which is here:
http://www.chess.com/article/view/alexander-alekhine-pt-1-and-the-game-of-death
...but the best way to find all seven parts is to load the final part, and you'll find links (at the bottom) to all seven parts:
http://www.chess.com/article/view/alexander-alekhine-part-7-the-dark-years