Tal Memorial: Aronian and Karjakin win the title

The 5th Tal Memorial took place from November 5th to November 14th, in Moscow, Russia. It was a nine-round round-robin event. Time control: 40 moves in 100 minutes followed by 20 moves in 50 minutes followed by the game in 15 minutes with a 30 second increment as of move one.

Round nine (final)

The joint winner Levon Aronian, who scored 5.5/9 (2830 performance) and gained four rating points

Equal first on every tie-break score: Sergey Karjakin gained ten rating points with a 2835 performance

Beaten on SB tiebreaks: Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, 2835 performance, nine rating points

US GM Hikaru Nakamura also scored 5.0/7 and won seven rating points

Chinese GM Wang Hao, 5.0/9 with a 2799 performance and a gain of nine rating points

Israeli GM Boris Gelfand scored 3.5/9 and lost eight rating points in this event

Alexei Shirov had a bad tournament, with 3.0/9 which lost him twelve rating points

Pavel Eljanov finished at just 2.5/9 (five losses) and shed 18 rating points in Moscow

Pictures by Yana Melnikova

Final standings after nine rounds of play

Tiebreaks

There were some unusual problems with the tiebreaks in this event. Three players tied for first, and the first tiebreaker, the results of direct encounters, did not decide anything, since all games between the three were drawn. The second criterion is the so-called "Koya system", where the number of points scored against opponents who have 50% or more in the final table. Here, too, all three were equal. The next criterion is Sonneborn-Berger, which sees Aronian and Karjakin ahead of Mamedyarov, but equal to each other. Another possible tiebreaker, the number of games each player won, also solves nothing – both beat Gelfand and Kramnik. so it looks very much like Levon Aronian and Sergey Karjakin will end up sharing first and this year's Tal Memorial trophy.

Live Chess Rankings

After this tournament when the ratings were calculated for all top players in the world, Magnus Carlsen leads, ahead of World Champion Viswanathan Anand, with Levon Aronian, who gained four rating points in Moscow, in third place. Vladimir Kramnik lost five points but still keeps his fourth place in the world rankings. Sergey Karjakin and Shakhriyar Mamedyarov are big winners with ten and nine points added to their ratings. Chinese GM Wang Hao has taken a big leap forward with nine extra points, while the eternally unpredictable Alexei Shirov lost a whopping twelve points to drop to 24th place in the live rankings. Please note that these "live ratings" are not official ratings. They are published by FIDE every two months and do not change in the periods in between.

Statistics Of the 45 games played at the Tal Memorial 2010 White won 14 games = 31.1% Black won 3 games = 6.7% 28 games were drawn = 62.2%

Results, games and reports

Links Official tournament site All games in PGN The games were 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 PGN games. New and enhanced: CB Light 2009!