by Johannes Fischer
10/23/2017 – One of the world's strongest team events, the Bundesliga, pits 16 teams with eight boards each against each other, on seven weekends over six months for a round-robin tournament. As each team can nominate as many non-German players as money allows, top players such as Fabiano Caruana, Vishy Anand, and Anatoly Karpov, to name just a few, regularly show their skills in the league. This season's favourite is the OSG Baden-Baden, which has dominated for more than a decade. But Hockenheim and Solingen hope to have a shot at the title should Baden-Baden stumble. On the first weekend it did not.