In times of crisis, when tournaments are getting smaller or even disappearing from the chess calendar, it's great news that this year's 40th anniversary edition of the Sparkassen Chess Meeting in Dortmund will have ten participants. They are Vladimir Kramnik, Fabiano Caruana, Sergey Karjakin, Ruslan Ponomariov, Peter Leko, Arkadij Naiditsch, Mateusz Bartel, Daniel Fridman, Georg Meier and Jan Gustafsson.

This year's tournament in Dortmund will take place between the 13th and 22nd of July. The 40th jubilee edition is a 10-player round robin. In recent years the tournament was a 6-player, double round robin but thanks to a cooperation with the German Chess Federation the full squad (and gold medal winners) of the 2011 European Team Championship could be added.

Dortmund 2012 | Participants

The International Dortmund Chess Days – since 1994 "Sparkassen Chess-Meeting" – celebrated its "birth event" in 1973, which was won Heikki Westerinen of Finland. Over the years the tournament grew into a world class event where almost all of the best players competed, including Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, Judit Polgar and of course tenfold winner Vladimir Kramnik.

Parallel to the main event is the traditional Dortmund Sparkassen Open, with an A and a B-group, in the City Hall. Last year the main tournament was won for the 10th (!) time by Vladimir Kramnik, who will surely try to add another title to his list.

Schedule and pairings

Traditionally, for Dortmund the drawing of lots takes place months in advance. At a press conference on April 26th, this led to the following schedule: