Former World Chess Champion GM Vladimir Kramnik competed in Titled Tuesday today, and decided to resign on move two against GM Jose Martinez!
Scoring 4/4 points, Vladimir Kramnik was paired against the Mexican Grandmaster Jose Martinez who recently showed great performance in chess.com’s online tournaments. Jose Martinez won the Chessable Masters 2024 Play-In phase, after defeating some of the World’s top grandmasters: Vincent Keymer, Aryan Tari, and drawing to Alireza Firouzja, Wesley So, and Hikaru Nakamura.
Kramnik decided not to play this game and resigned after 1.e4 e6 2.d4. “The reason is that there are some players with statistics, and again it’s not an accusation, they might be fine, but statistics is such that I, and I guess many other players would like a report and an explanation of why the statistics is okay. I mean, it’s nothing against the player, it’s more like if you want to protest against chess.com, I think they must provide us a report, and if everything is okay – everything is okay“, explained Vladimir Kramnik during his Titled Tuesday live stream.
Video from Vladimir Kramnik’s live stream when he got paired against Jose Martinez: