The Grandmaster Tournament of the Chess Days remains a top-class event also after the 2002 Candidates Tournament. Summer after summer, several world-class players are now drawn to Dortmund. First and foremost the current World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, who will play in Dortmund every year until the end of his career in 2018. Kramnik is enough as a drawing card and advertising medium, but in sporting terms a superstar is not enough for a top tournament. The tournament, which is top-class on paper, is held in 2010 with an average of 2734 Elo points.
The 2007 tournament (photo of participants in 2007, by Christian Lünig) can be rated even higher. The Elo average of 2727 is razor-thinly below that of three years later, but first of all there are eight participants on the boards in the 2007 tournament, while three years later there are only six.
As the reigning World Champion, Kramnik already meets the man who will take the title from him shortly afterwards in Mexico City: Viswanathan Anand of India. The game ends in a draw. What could only be guessed at the time: Anand's successor also sits at the board in Dortmund and celebrates his premiere in Dortmund: the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen (photo 2007). The then 16-year-old had nothing to do with the tournament success. He loses to Kramnik, draws the six other games and ends up in 6th place out of 8.
Carlsen will only come to Dortmund one more time, in 2009, but the starting position is already different: The Norwegian is ranked 3rd in the world with 2770 Elo and is the first seed in the double-round tournament. For a long time it looked good for him: He wins against the Russian Jakowenko in the very first round and leads the standings alone until the seventh of ten rounds. But in Round 8 the dream of a Dortmund victory ends: Carlsen loses again to Kramnik. In the end, the Norwegian is one point behind the then already dethroned World Champion in a shared second place.
Final standings 2007
1 Vladimir Kramnik 5.0
2. Evgeny Alexeev 4.0
3. Peter Leko 4.0
4. Viswanthan Anand 4.0
5. Shakhriyar Mamedyarov 3.5
6. Magnus Carlsen 3.0
7. Boris Gelfand 2.5
8. Arkadji Naiditsch 2.0
The grandmaster tournament is always accompanied by the popular open tournaments and other events. In 2007, for example, there will be a match between two former winners of the International Dortmund Chess Days: Vlastimil Hort will clearly prevail against the very first winner Heikki Westerinen. On the days without a match, the participants are available for autographs, simultaneous presentations or blitz events for the club players, often in the Dortmund City Hall.
In the grandmaster tournament, German players continue to get the chance to prove themselves against the world class. First and foremost in the new millennium is Arkadij Naiditsch (photo 2006), the home-grown talent of the Dortmund chess school.
Completely surprisingly, Naiditsch achieved what was probably his greatest career success in 2005: with 5.5 points from 9 games, he won the tournament half a point ahead of the assembled world elite. He only lost to the runner-up Veselin Topalov and won against Peter Leko, Emil Sutovsky and Peter Heine Nielsen. Since the opponents steal each other's points and Kramnik only finishes in the middle of the field this year, he is the winner of the Sparkassen Chess Meeting 2005.
In 2011 Vladimir Kramnik then reaches the unique mark of ten tournament victories in Dortmund. No grandmaster in the 50-year history comes close to this number of tournament victories.
In the 2010s, Fabiano Caruana, who later challenged for the world championship, made a big splash in Dortmund: He won the 2012, 2014 and 2015 Chess Days, and Ian Nepomniachtchi, who recently came within a whisker of winning the World Championship, can also add his name to the list of winners in 2018.
The last grandmaster tournament in the Orchesterzentrum NRW in Dortmund's Brückstraße will then take place in 2019. It will be won by Lenier Dominguez Perez (USA) in the first year after Kramnik's official career end. It was not only the last edition before the move back to the Westfalenhallen Dortmund, but also the last event before the Corona pandemic.
In all those years, other special games were played on the Dortmund stage. One prize-winning one was Vishy Anand's victory over Viorel Bologan, who nevertheless won the tournament in 2003: