8th title for Kramnik in Dortmund

The standings stayed exactly the same after four more drawn games in the last round and so Kramnik won his 8th Dortmund title without much trouble. Five times he ended shared first and two times before he took clear first, this year for the third time. My early conclusion turned out right: we won’t remember this tournament very long. A lot of draws, a lot of games where almost nothing happened. Probably because there wasn’t an artist such as Shirov or Morozevich in the field, but also because the ones who qualified for Mexico were taking it easy and left their most important opening ideas to be used at the Wch. Though Leko did try to win yesterday, for 107 moves, and at some point had a winning rook ending against Mamedyarov.

To be fair we should add that Kramnik’s performance was a fine one, scoring a super solid, almost 2900 performance. Now that he has slightly improved his reputation as a tournament player, we should probably call him the favorite to win in Mexico. Anand and Leko were more solid than fighting and scored plus one without losing, which is nothing special for them but actually is a fine score for Alekseev. With his 4/7 he more than justified his ‘Aeroflot ticket’. Mamedyarov’s tournament was reasonable though from looking at his determination at the start of the tournament I think he must have been hoping for more, here in Dortmund, just like before in Sofia. Carlsen had a tough Candidates Match behind him when he travelled to Germany with his father Henrik and the fact that he is now one of the 2700 guys must give him some satisfaction. Gelfand probably lacked some energy as well after Elisa and Naiditsch, the current champion of Germany, never seemed confident enough to even think about his play in 2005.

Final standings:

  1. Kramnik          5.0
2-4. Anand, Leko,
     Alekseev         4.0
  5. Mamedyarov,      3.5
  6. Carlsen          3.0
  7. Gelfand          2.5
  8. Naiditsch        2.0

Here the last video from Dortmund; a full blitz game by Peter Leko:

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