Chess Classic Mainz 2008 (CCM8)

When a two page article on chess960 by Alexandra Kosteniuk in the October 2008 issue of Europe Echecs (EE) looked familiar, I set out on a Google search. After a minute or so I located How I kept my FiNet Chess960 World Champion title, and determined that the EE article was largely a translation of that Chesstigers.de page.

The Chess Tigers group is the organizer for the annual Chess Classic Mainz tournament, of which the 2008 edition was denoted by the acronym CCM8. A little more research determined that the '8' in CCM8 stands for both the year 2008 and the 8th edition of CCM. As TWIC reported in 2001,

The Frankfurt Chess Classic rapid tournament moved to Mainz with a new sponsor Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz and the support of the chess playing mayor of Mainz Mayor Beutel. (TWIC 347; 2 July 2001)

The 2000 Frankfurt Chess Classic had included a chess960 prototype event:

There was an event advertised as a Fischer-Random match between Artur Jussupow and Fritz which the computer won 2-0. However it was in reality just shuffle or randomised chess as the organisers did implement the rules for the initial position as Fischer envisaged them. (TWIC 294; 26 June 2000)

I'm certain that TWIC meant to say that the organizers 'did not implement the rules'. As Gligoric pointed out in Shall We Play Fischerandom Chess?, neither game had the King starting between the two Rooks.

The 2001 Chess Classic Mainz (CCM1) was, according to the title of a chapter in Gligoric's book, the 'World Premiere of Fischerandom Chess at a High Level'. Leko beat Adams +2-1=5 in a match. The name of Fischer's variant was changed to chess960 in CCM2 (2002), and has been included as a main event in every year through CCM8. The Chesstigers.de pages for CCM8 have a link to pages for every previous event.

The domain Chess960.com appears to point to the same pages as Chesstigers.de. Kosteniuk's article can also be found at How I kept my FiNet Chess960 World Champion title (Chess960.com), and the registrant of Chess960.com is listed as 'Chess Tigers Schach-Foerderverein 1999 e.V.'