The Biel Chess Festival has a lot of history behind it. The list of past winners of the Grandmaster tournament includes Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, Vasily Ivanchuk, Alexei Shirov, Peter Svidler, Alexei Dreev, Anthony Miles, John Nunn, Lev Polugajevski, Boris Gulko, Ivan Sokolov, and more. The only local Swiss Grandmaster to win the tournament was Viktor Korchnoi, who won in 1979, and then again 22 years later in 2001.
The GM tournament is a 6-player double-round-robin format, which allows players to concentrate their preparations on just five other players. The double-round-robin format often sets the stage for exciting revenge matches in the second leg, much like Topalov’s comeback at this year’s Linares-Morelia tournament.
Read the entire article by Jordan S. Berson
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