Dates & venues Grand Prix announced
3 February 2008 13:27 PM | Last modified: 21:03
FIDE has announced the dates and venues for the 2008/2009 Grand Prix Tournaments: Baku, Krasnoyarsk, Doha, Montreux, Elista and Karlovy Vary.
Here’s the schedule for the first Grand Prix Series:
| When | Where |
| April 20th β May 6th 2008 | Baku, Azerbaijan |
| July 30th β August 15th 2008 | Krasnoyarsk (or other Russian city), Russia |
| December 13th β 29th 2008 | Doha, Qatar |
| April 14th β 28th, 2009 | Montreux, Switzerland |
| August 1st β 17th, 2009 | Elista, Russia |
| December 7th β 23rd, 2009 | Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic |
Reserve cities are Istanbul and Teheran.
Each tournament will be a 14-player all play all. The winner of the Grand Prix will play with the winner of the 2009 World Cup for the right to challenge the World Champion in 2010.
A PDF of the specific Grand Prix rules, set up by FIDE and Global Chess BV, can be downloaded here. The qualification criteria were already mentioned in our previous article on the Grand Prix. It made clear that Anand, Kramnik, Topalov, Kamsky, Shirov, Carlsen, Karjakin, Ivanchuk, Mamedyarov, Leko, Morozevich, Aronian, Radjabov and Gelfand have qualified (1st reserve Adams, 2nd Svidler, 3rd Polgar, 4th Grischuk).
Some interesting details:
- The original idea FIDE had, was to organise at least one Grand Prix Tournament on every continent. In this, (so far) they haven’t succeeded.
- The players are expected to cooperate reasonably with the media, and they are required to make themselves available for short interviews immediately after each game. ChessVibes says: excellent!
- At the Grand Prix tournaments, the “Sofia Rule” will be applied: players will not be allowed to offer draws directly to their opponents.
- The “handshake rule” at the GP tournaments is still quite unclear: “The players shall shake hands (or shall greet each other in a normal social manner in accordance with the conventional rules of their society) before the start and after the end of each game. If a player fails to meet these requirements and after being asked to do so by the Chief Arbiter, then he will lose the game immediately.”
- The recommended prize money which will be offered by host city organisers for each tournament is 212,000 Euros and is split 162,000 Euros as direct prize money for the tournament and 50,000 Euros towards an accumulated prize fund for the players at the end of the series.
- How the overall winner is decided? He will be the one who will score the most number of cumulative points. The cumulative score will be calculated from the best three results for each player.
Place EUR Points 1 30,000 140 + 40 bonus 2 22,500 130 + 20 3 20,000 120 + 10 4 15,000 110 5 12,500 100 6 11,000 90 7 10,000 80 8 8,500 70 9 7,500 60 10 6,000 50 11 5,500 40 12 5,000 30 13 4,500 20 14 4,000 10
At the end of the series, the following prizes will be awarded:
Overall Place Accumulated Prize (Euros)
1st 75,000
2nd 50,000
3rd 40,000
4th 30,000
5th 25,000
6th 20,000
7th 18,000
8th 16,000
9th 14,000
10th 12,000
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I don’t see how the handshake rule is unclear at all!
If your opponent offers his hand at the beginning or end of the game… take it and shake vigorously! If you refuse and he brings it to the arbiter and he tells you to do it… do it! Or lose…
This is a fine rule and is really quite simple. The whole purpose behind this rule is to *not* get into parsing the rule and trying to find advantages. It is simple sportsmanship.
Firstly, the use of the word “shall” in “the players shall shake hands” is not a chrystal-clear choice of words. And what about “a normal social manner in accordance with the conventional rules of their society”? What’s normal to one player from one society, isn’t for the other. We’ve seen that before. Why not something like “Players are obliged to either shake hands or wish each other a good/sportive game, or both”?
a “a normal social manner in accordance with the conventional rules of their society” could be like for example chinese people bowing to eachother, u know…
I guess the shaking of hands is not a world-wide habit.
isnΒ΄t it boring, always the same players? Nobody can join this exclusive club?!
I especially like the part with the FIDE president being able to choose a couple of participants. it is a very logical and non-arbitrary way of selecting players into the world championship cycle, avoiding difficult and unfair procedures of qualifications through accepted tournaments and/or rating points. Other sports can learn from this, for example one of the 32 countries participating in the world cup of footbal (soccer) could simply and naturally be one team that the president of FIFA chooses from guiding principles such as profit expectations and/or various global political aspects.
Fantastisch nieuws, het is Kok en consorten dus toch gelukt. De World Cup van de jaren 80-90 revisited maar dan in een modern jasje, d.w.z. inclusief de anti-remise regels.
Ik lees in de regelementen dat er 21 deelnemers zullen zijn die allen in vier toernooien (naar keuze) moeten uitkomen, dus net als in de jaren 80. Vermoedelijk zal Topalov Elista en Krasnoyarsk wel overslaan…
As the German version of Chessbase notes, the Grand Prix Series has disadvantages as well:
The main advantage to me seems that with these Grand Prix-series finally the World Championship system is complete.
Also, more money will flow into (top)chess and in combination with the anti-draw rules we’d see interesting chess. All of this should increase the status of chess and have a positive impact on the rest of the chess world….
Of course, the main risk to these Grand Prix-series and to the status of chess in general is the behavior of the players themselves!
I think in each of the Grand-Prix tournament they should also have a B-group. This would allow the slightly lower rated players also to participate and in each tournament they should interchange the top 2 from B group with the bottom 2 in A group from the previous tourney. This will result in more competition and more fighting chess.
Peter, ok. But does it really matter? I think most players are intelligent enough to know that if they don’t act like asses then they won’t run afoul of the rule.
The Corus tournament has just ended and the Linares tournament will start soon. How do these so-called Grand Slam tournaments relate to these Grand Prix tournaments? I would say that the Grand Prix tournaments have a higher priority since the winner gets certain rights to go on for the World Title, whereas in the Grand Slam series this is not the case. I can imagine that this new Grand Prix series will harm traditional, classic tournaments like Wijk aan Zee and Linares. And also the MTel tournament in Sofia will start immediately after the end of the Grand Prix tournament in Bakoe.
@ Amit
That’s a very good idea, that’d be for sure interesting. Plus it would give players who just played little games (like Polgar when being pregnant) and therefore didn’t make it in the “A” a fair chance.
I by the way don’t like the calendar being so packed. Big tournament will become like Fastfood; more important, the PHYSICAL strenght of the player will play a higher role than before (at least if they do care a lot about being World Champion). I don’t think that’s good.