Monaco, the land of casinos and luxury cars, annually organizes an intriguing set of matches in “The Melody Amber Blindfold and Rapid Chess Tournament.” The Melody Amber tournament combines blind and rapid chess with a $288,000 prize fund, enough money to convince many of the world’s best players to include this meeting in their agendas.

In fact, it is considered to be the strongest blind chess tournament in the world. All the Grandmasters frequently play rapid chess, but blind chess is a variation with which players have to be very careful.

In the 19th and early 20th century, this practice was very common. Top Grandmasters used to participate in exhibitions where they played several blind games simultaneously. This does not happen anymore because blind chess has proven to be a dangerous practice. Grandmasters who used to play this variation often needed several days, even weeks, to recover from the intense effort.

In the Melody Amber tournament, the participants play one game at a time and are allowed to see an empty board with no figures. In comparison to playing blindfolded, this lowers the stress level considerably.

This year’s winner was none other than world champion Vladimir Kramnik. The Russian had previously won this tournament six times, but never as convincingly as this year. Especially in the blind games, he played at an extremely high level. Kramnik did not drop a single game and was able to accrue nine of the 11 possible points.

In the rapid games, only the Indian Viswanathan Anand finished with more points than him, but in the combined score of the tournament Kramnik tallied a two‑point advantage over the second place Anand.

Today we present Kramnik’s 7th blind game. His opponent was the Hungarian Peter Leko who opened with the Marshall attack. This game took shape as blind revenge to a game these two Grandmasters played during the 2004 world championship in Brissago, Switzerland. Back then, Leko won with black pieces, but this time Kramnik took the victor’s point.