Nanjing R10: Topalov wins Pearl Spring with 2890 performance

2008 Pearl Spring Chess Tournament, Nanjing, China

Final standings

The Closing Press Conference of the Nanjing Pearl Spring Chess Tournament

1. The overall situation of the tournament

Nanjing Pearl Spring Chess Tournament opened on December 10th and closed on December 21st, lasting for 12 days. In addition to games, activities featuring unique Nanjing culture and tradition were also organized, including the opening ceremony, the ceremonial move, the closing ceremony and prize-awarding ceremony tonight and one-day-trip in Nanjing.

The World Chess Federation, FIDE, certifies that the tournament becomes one of the rated events of FIDE. It is the strongest tournament in 2008. FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov remarked that: “There is no doubt that Pearl Spring Chess Tournament in Nanjing has already become the most influential chess event in Asia and the strongest in China. Six top international chess grandmasters gathered in Nanjing and showed their intelligence through chess art.”

The tournament received a great deal of support from FIDE, ECU, Asian Chess Union (ACU) and China Chess Association, leaders at all levels, as well as the media. At the tournament, global automatic live broadcast via Internet was made avaible for the first time in China. ChessBase, the biggest chess portal, and Playchess, the biggest chess-playing online network, both broadcast live the tournament. Domestic websites such as Sina, Huaao, and Chess Online also had a live video broadcast. During this tournament, we received 72 media outlets with 100 journalists. According to incomplete statistics till now, there have been 2050 media reports on this tournament. Media at home and abroad, including FIDE and ChessBase, have links or special coverage of the tournament. Up until the afternoon of December 21st, the web pages related to this tournament have reached 84,200 in Baidu and 228,000 in Google through keyword searching. The total page views of the official network station of this tournament have reached 62,005 and the highest daily page view was more than 11,000. Among all the visitors, ninety percent were foreigners, most of whom are from Germany, America, France and Bulgaria.

2. The Development of and Plan for the Tournament

The tournament will be unified with other world chess super tournaments and renamed as Nanjing Pearl Spring Chess Tournament. Currently, the organizing committee is applying to get the tournament to be part of the world Grand Slam tournaments, thus making it a high-level world chess event after the Corus Wij aan Zee in Holland, Linares Super Tournament in Spain, Sofia Super Tournament in Bulgaria and Bilbao Grand Slam Chess Final. It will also be the highest-level chess tournament in Asia.

The organizing committee has held talks with Boris Kutin, President of the European Chess Union, and Silvio Danialov, director of the Grand Slam Chess Association. The annual meeting the Grand Slam Chess Association to be held in January 2009 will absorb one or two members. Entrusted by the Association, Mr. Dnanilov has conducted a comprehensive survey into this tournament and believes that this tournament in Pukou is qualified be a world super tournament in terms of the prize offered, the rating, the reception and the overall operation, Mr.Dnanilov has submitted a report to the Association.

The tournament is working to diversify the tournament by adding extra woman grandmaster games so that the tournament will appeal to more spectators with richer content.

At the same time, through the world top-level chess tournament, the organizing committee aims at popularizing chess in the the hosting place and China at large. To this end, Jiangpu Experimental Primary school, Nanjing Foreign Languages School and Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology will be certified at the closing ceremony as schools with chess education featuring their student competence-enhancing curricula.

Since the very beginning, the 2008 Chess Tournament Nanjing, China has been aiming at building a platform for holding high-level world sports events, showing Nanjing as an international city, and facilitating dialogue between eastern and western cultures. This tournament concluded this afternoon. Hereby, on behalf the organizing committee, I’d like to extend my sincere gratitude to all journalists for your consistent interest in and support for the tournament.

The closing of the strongest chess tournament on Chinese soil

A blowup from the above picture, with Veselin Topalov proudly showing his prize check

Blowup: Vassily Ivanchuk, Levon Aronian and Bu Xiangzhi with their trophies

Peter Svidler behind Nobel Prize laureate Robert Mundel

Hands full: Vassily Ivanchuk with his 20,000 Euro fifth-sixth prize

Everybody: players, organisers, helpers, officials, dignitaries

The Nanjing Great City Wall

Extracts from the Event Profile by Lisa Jingxia

As a huge ancient project and the pride of Nanjing's people, the Great City Wall, began to be built in 1366 and completed in 1386. It is 33.7 kms long, with a height and top width ranging from 14 meters to 21 meters. Surrounding the city, the Great City wall was the longest preserved in the world – the most telling witness of the history in Nanjing and the crystallization of science, technology, military, architecture and art.

As one of the special products of Chinese culture, the City Wall occupied an important position in the development of Chinese culture. The Nanjing City Wall was designed by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang after he founded the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and established it as the capital 600 years ago. To consolidate his sovereignty and keep the invaders out, he adopted the suggestions of advisor Zhu Sheng to building a higher city wall. It took 21 years for the project, which involved 200,000 laborers to move seven million cubic meters of earth.

An outing with the players on the free day

Manager and king-maker Silvio Danialov, top client Veselin Topalov

There are dragons in there, Lev – Aronian feeling queasy about a giant metal bowl

The city wall was a military defensive project to defend the city. Different from ancient city walls in Beijing and Xi'an, its design and construction were unique and changed the old ways of equilibrium and symmetry. The construction concentrated on military defense, as the city was at the foot of the Purple mountain – a natural barrier to controll the commanding elevation with the river as its natural city moat. Because of this, the 60-square-kilometer Nanjing city became strategically located and difficult to conquer.

Boating – or rather barging – on the Yangtze River Delta

Nanjing's city wall was an impotant part of Nanjing's military defensive system. The specialities of the Nanjing City Wall was that it adopted a winding, free style, based on the city's complicated topography. Experts from Nanjing Cultural Relic Bureau say most of the foundations use granite, rectangle stones or limestone. The walls were packed layer by layer with rubbles bricks, gravel and earth. All the brickwork were jointed by the mixture of lime, water and cooked rice. The wall would become rather firm after the mixture solidified. That is why the city wall has stood for a long time. On top of the outer wall were 13,616 crenels, or battlements, for defenders of the city to observe the enemy or dodge arrows. Opposite it was the parapet wall used as a balustrade to keep the defenders and horses safe.

The river and restaurant boats at night

Levon Aronian with his charming Filipino-Australian girlfriend Arianne Caoili

Today the 600-year-old city wall of Nanjing is still erect. Standing on the wall, you will see gaint ancient trees under your feet. Aside the top wall, there are stone sluices to drain rain and near the wall's foundation, there are further outlets. This, perhaps, is another reason for its powerful foundation and defense projects. The ancient city wall was listed as a key cultural relic under the state protection in 1988.

Schedule and results

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games will be being broadcast live on the official web site and on the chess server Playchess.com. If you are not a member you can download the free PGN reader ChessBase Light, which gives you immediate access. You can also use the program to read, replay and analyse the PGN games.