From Thursday July 13 to Sunday July 22, 2012 the 41st edition annual Sparkassen Chess-Meeting is taking place in Dortmund, Germany. It is a ten-player round robin played. Draw offers are not allowed – a game can only be declared a draw, by the arbiter, if there is no possible win for one side, or if a position is repeated three times. The winner of the tournament will be determined after nine rounds.

Games start at 15:00h = 3 p.m. local time (CEST, = 17:00 Moscow, 14:00 p.m. London, 9:00 a.m. New York). All games will be broadcast by the official web site's "Live Games" page and on the Playchess.com server. As in the previous year the moves of the Sparkassen Chess-Meeting will be transmitted on the Internet with a delay of 15 minutes – which means that the moves stay in the playing hall for that period, before they are broadcast to the rest of the world. This is an important anti-cheating measure that has been proposed to FIDE since October 2005 and has the support of most of the top players. We commend the Dortmund organisers for taking the initiative.

Round three

It was a bloody round, especially for the German representatives as three out of the four lost their games today. The only one to come out unscathed was Arkadij Naiditsch who held Sergey Karjakin to a draw with black. Whether or not Jan Gustafsson was unrecovered from his game the day before, he never seemed comfortable in his game against Peter Leko, and lost.

Naiditsch was the only home player to survive

Georg Meier somehow managed to find his queen stranded on his kingside under the fire of Ruslan Ponomariov's pieces, and as a result, not only did he find her kicked all the way from g4 to a7, but the Ukrainian used all these tempi to bust open the German's kingside as well.

Meier found his queen chased to the other side of the board by Ponomariov

Fabiano Caruana once again showed his strong nerves as he bounced back from his loss against Ponomariov with fine technique against Daniel Fridman as he outplayed him in the endgame and brought home the bacon. One wonders whether he can keep it up as he has played 92 classical games this year so far. And people thought Ivanchuk played a lot...

It has been a rough test of fire for Bartel as he plays his first elite round-robin

Mateusz Bartel has had as rough a start as can get, losing his first three games, but to be fair, he also played the two top rated players, Karjakin and Kramnik, which has not made it any easier.

A promising start for Kramnik

After three rounds, Vladimir Kramnik and Ruslan Ponomariov have taken the early lead with 2.5/3.

Standings after three rounds

Schedule and results

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games are being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download a free Playchess client there and get immediate access. You can also use ChessBase 11 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs.

Previous reports

• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2011
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2010
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2009
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2008
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2007
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2006
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2005
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2004
• ChessBase reports on Dortmund 2003

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