Alexander Morozevich won the Moscow Blitz Championship on Sunday. The Russian top grandmaster, who recently had to withdraw from the Biel tournament and also the Olympiad squad, secured victory with a round to spare. It was the 6th time that Morozevich won the Moscow Blitz.

Alexander Morozevich | Photo courtesy of the official website

The traditional Moscow Blitz Championship was held for the 66th (!) time on Sunday, outside the Institute of Architecture, Media and Design in the Russian capital. The first edition took place in 1946 and it has always been very popular among professional and amateur players. Over the years, the tournament was attended by e.g. Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Vassily Smyslov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik...

This year the tournament took about six hours and was held over different subgroups - men, women, veterans (men and women), boys and girls, a tournament among journalists and an amateur tournament. The rate of play was 3 minutes and 2 seconds increment per move.

At the opening ceremony none other than FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov gave a speech, and also the head of the Department of Physical Culture and Sport in Moscow, Alexei Vorobiev and the President of the Moscow Chess Federation, Vladimir Palikhata, a businessman and philanthropist.

The tournament was broadcast live, with video. You can still watch everything here.

Fans of Alexander Morozevich will be relieved to hear that the Muscovite won the tournament with a round to spare, for the 6th time. Recently he had to withdraw from the Biel tournament due to illness, and he was subsequently substituted by Evgeny Tomashevsky in the Olympic team.

Morozevich took the lead from the start and held it throughout the tournament. He ended on 17/21, 2 points ahead of Vladimir Malakhov. Yuri Balashov became the winner of the veterans championship.

Moscow Blitz 2012 | Final standings

Source: Chess-Results

During the tournament there was something that attracted great interest of the participants: a robot, designed by Konstantin Kosteniuk, that played blitz simultaneously on three boards with everyone. Even Ilyumzhinov played a couple of casual games against the robot, and this experience led to a new brain wave: to hold a chess tournament among robots on Mars. According to the tournament website the head of FIDE is soon meeting people of NASA, and he's planning to propose the project...