Tal Memorial

The Tal Memorial is an annual chess tournament played in Moscow from 2006 to 2016 with the exception of 2015, to honour the memory of the former World Champion Mikhail Tal (1936–1992).

Many of the world's strongest players compete. In 2014 it was held as only as a blitz tournament and the classical event was replaced by the TASHIR Petrosian Memorial. It returned in October 2016.

The inaugural Tal Memorial was held as a ten-player single round robin event with a classical time control of two hours for the first 40 moves, one hour for the next 20 moves, then 15 minutes for the rest of the game and 30 seconds added per move from move 60. The time control changed for subsequent editions to 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for the next 20 moves, then 15 minutes with 30 seconds added per move from move one. Draws could not be agreed before move 40.

For 2012 and 2013, a round-robin blitz tournament was held in order to decide the pairings for the main event with time control of 3 minutes plus two seconds per move. In 2014, the classical part did not take place and the Tal Memorial became solely a blitz tournament with the time control of 4 minutes plus 2 seconds per move in a double round robin of twelve players.

In case of a tie the placings were decided by: number of games played with Black, number of wins, direct encounter, Koja co-efficient and Sonnenborn-Berger score. In 2010 Levon Aronian and Sergey Karjakin shared the title as their tiebreaks were all equal.

The 2009 competition was held from 5 to 14 November, with 10 of the 13 highest rated players participating: Viswanathan Anand, then the World Champion, Levon Aronian, Vladimir Kramnik, former world champion, Magnus Carlsen, the world champion of 2013, Peter Leko, Vassily Ivanchuk, Boris Gelfand, Alexander Morozevich, Ruslan Ponomariov and Peter Svidler. The Elo average was 2761 (Cat. XXI), which was the highest ever reached by the tournament, trailing only the 2011, 2012, and 2013 tournaments. It was won solidly by Vladimir Kramnik with a +3 score, i.e. three wins and six draws. Ivanchuk and Carlsen shared second place with +2.

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