Are you ready? The great season is going to start. After months of minor tournaments   - mostly opens in Europe - we are now approaching the season of elite events. As a luxurious hors d'oeuvre ICC relayed the top boards from the European Team Championship which, with all the GMs from the home country, plus all the players from the former republics and other nations, is nearly as impressive as an Olympiad. Some of the teams actually have rosters that average over 2700! So there have been several heavy-weight matchups every day, which makes this event always fun to watch. Elite players such as Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Morozevich, Sergey Karjakin, Ruslan Ponomariov, Peter Svidler, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Ernesto Inarkiev, Viktor Bologan, Pavel Eljanov, Emil Sutovsky, Nikita Vitiugov, Dmitry Jakovenko - fresh off his stunning triumph at the European Individual Championship - Alexei Shirov, and many other strong GMs offered us an interesting and enthralling week of chess. The Team Tomsk-400, with Karjakin, Ponomariov, Inarkiev, Motylev, Bologan, Khismatullin, Areshchenko and Kurnosov was able to win over the potentially stronger St. Petersburg (Svidler, Vitiugov, Domingez, Movsesian, Efimenko) and  ShSM-64 (Caruana, Wang Hao, Leko, Giri, Raizantev). The 7 round event has moved the rating list, with Karjakin - +12 points - now #6, Nakamura #7 and Caruana #8, followed by Morozevich and Ivanchuk.
Caruna played 27 games in 42 days - Rejkyavik Open, Swiss League, European Individual Championship and Russian Team - with a score of +13 =13 -1, gaining 5 rating points. The Italian stallion loves to play, and apparently he doesn't care about his - impressive - rating!

Only 6 days after the end of the Russian stars parade, we will be on the air with Chess.FM for the super-match between GMs Vladimir Kramnik and Levon Aronian. Click here for information. It's the first time in history that two "over 2800" play in a match. The match will be 6 games, but there is a plus for the audience: if a game ends in a draw within three hours, there will be a rapid game played (which doesn't count against the final result of the match), to decide who is the winner of the day. ICC Chess.FM will be with you every day, with its team of talents: Yasser Seirawan, Ronen Har-Zvi, Var Akobian, Jon Ludvig Hammer, Joel Benjamin, Larry Christiansen, Ben Finegold and last but not least, Alex Yermolinsky. GM Suat Atalik will provide the daily Game Of the Day video. There will be the Trivia contest during the broadcast and the GOTD Trivia, where every day a lucky ICC member can win a one-year subscription to the best chess magazine in the world: New in Chess! Games start at 9AM ICC time (EDT) - don't miss the action!

On a sad note, it seems like Linares will be cancelled for the second year in a row. Lack of sponsorship and clash with other important elite events seem be the main reasons. We all hope that this important tournament will be back live next year!

Your feedback is very important to us, as it allows our talent to address topics of general interest in their video-lectures. In a new series of his acclaimed weekly show "Every Russian Schoolboy Knows” GM Alex listened to your feedback and requests and is going back to the basics of the endgame. Yes, the pawn endgames: an important part of chess theory we too often neglect to study, thinking we already "know better”. GM Yermolinsky, in this 5-video series, intends to teach us methods and strategies rather than just calculations; the concepts and ideas that will help us deal correctly with pawn endgames.

2012 is the year of the great ICC giveaway, with FREE ICC apps for download! Everyone will be looking to play at the best online chess club with new holiday gifts of iPhones, iPads and Android phones. And here at ICC, such was the large response to our original free holiday offer we're extending it by making ALL of our mobile apps free for the time being.

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