Linares 2009 chess tournament had ended with the victory of Russian Alexander Grishchuk, who was followed by Ukrainian Vassily Ivanchuk on the second place, and Norwegian Magnus Carlsen on number three. The fourth place was taken by Viswanathan Anand, world champion and former Linares champion for 1998, 2007-2008, who had made his first display of competitive chess play since regaining his World Chess Championship title at the end of 2008. Chess grandmaster Alexander Grishchuk declared victory of the 26th Linares chess tournament, held between February 18th and March 8th at the city of Linares, Spain, after a tiebreaker with Vassily Ivanchuk, both attaining final score of 8 points. Although Ivanchuk lost in none of the games, Linares tiebreaker system names the player who gained more wins as the winner.

Thus, Grischuk who won three games (out of fourteen: against Wang Yue, Teimour Radjabov and Levon Aronian) comparing to his Ukrainian rival two victories (twice against Levon Aronian), was awarded the title, the €100,000 1st prize and his participation at the next Grand Slam final in Bilbao, Spain.

Linares 2009 is probably not going to leave a strong impression on the history of chess tournaments. Most of the games played during the three weeks tournament were drawn and some of the leading chess players were missing; Vesselin Topalov and Gata Kamsky spent the last week of February in Sophia, Bulgaria playing the Chess Challengers 2009 match, while Vladimir Kramnik was busy changing his newborn diapers.