Σκακιστικά νέα

The European Hybrid Qualification Tournament 2021 for the FIDE World Chess Cup 2021 will take place from 22nd-30th May through Tornelo online platform. Live games from the top boards will be daily on Chessdom.com

FTX Crypto Chess Cup 2021 is going to start this week. The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour delivers a world first for its next event – an elite-level bitcoin chess tournament. The star-studded FTX Crypto Cup offers a record prize pot for an online tournament of $320,000.

A cool $100,000 of that is a bonus paid in crypto by new sponsor FTX. Fans will be able to track the prize pot’s value in real-time throughout the broadcast to see how it fluctuates.

The 10th jubilee season of the Swedish Rapid Team Battle kicks off this Wednesday, May 19th.

Around 400 players will compete for 26 Swedish chess clubs. The event will be played Online at Lichess, with 5 rounds taking place every Wednesday from 19:30 CEST. The time control is 10 minutes + 2 seconds.

In 2012 Vishy Anand won his World Championship against Boris Gelfand in Moscow. The next day both the champion and his rival went to meet the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In their conversations, Vishy mentioned that he learnt chess at a Soviet Cultural Center called the Tal Chess Club. “So, we brought this upon ourselves,” replied Putin!

The ECU Girls and Women’s weekend took place 15-16 May. Hosted by the German Chess Youth Association aka Deutsche Schachjugend e.V., the virtual festival collected more than 800 participants. They enjoyed a rich program of events including multiple GM/IM/WGM/WIM/WFM simuls, seminars by top players, live commentary, workshops, coaching sessions, and series of tournaments.

The Super Heroes Cup 2021, organized by Chessbase India, took place 14-16 May. 16 real life super heroes fought in a knock-out tournament and all of them are already winners!

The event featured 6 visually impaired persons, 6 physically disabled and 3 deaf. Read more about participants here.

Koivisto,  the open source chess engine by Kim Kåhre and Finn Eggers, is dominating the Qualification League of the Top Chess Engine Championship. After 19 rounds (out of total 26) it has collected 16,5/19. This is 2,5 points lead ahead of the second, the star debutant ClassicAra.

Belarus Open and Women’s Chess Championships 2021 simultaneously took place from 8-16 May in Minsk.

Both events were played within 9 rounds, swiss system, with 23 players in Open section and 12 players in Women’s section.

GM Marie Sebag is playing a simul exhibition as part of the ECU Girls and Women Chess Weekend. The commentary is provided by WGM Katarzyna Toma.

More on Girls and Women chess weekend