Australian-based VADR Media has announced that its esports-first chess-focused tournament and broadcast platform Checkmate.live has entered into an exclusive long-term partnership with the Arab Esports Federation (ARESF). The strategic partnership sees Checkmate become the Arab Esports Federations official online chess platform, data and broadcast partner.

In September, Checkmate also announced a similar partnership with the Asian Chess Federation, which membership consists of 52 national Chess Federations across Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. Both international partnerships further expand Checkmates reach across Asia, Oceania, the Middle East and Africa.

Read: The Asian Chess Federation, Checkmate partner to scale up online competitive chess

The partnership follows Checkmate recently opening its office in the UAE.

The Arab Esports Federation is the governing body of esports for 18 national esports associations across the Middle East and wider Arab region. The federation with its secretariat in the UAE is headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is led by Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan.

Checkmate is an esports-first competitive chess media company focused on producing and broadcasting linear and online tournaments for a new generation of players. It is an XR-led, international esports series and a skills-based Web3 platform that provides the opportunity to compete for glory, cash, credits and in-game assets. A key feature of the platform is its proprietary AI and computer vision-based Chess anti-cheat, which utilises a players web camera to monitor online match integrity.

The Arab Esports Federation is delighted to partner with Checkmate and whole heartily supports their vision of improving the integrity of the online game and promoting it as both an esport and sport. Online chess is not a sports simulation; its a natural extension of the over-the-board game. A game that brings with it many positive benefits, including higher female participation than esports, cognitive and mental improvements for players, good sportsmanship and brand safety for stakeholders, said ARESF secretary general Hisham Al Taher.

It is estimated globally that up to 700 million people play the 1500-year-old skill-based game, with 420 million of these players being between 18-34, the same demographic that has also seen brands increasingly flock to esports.

We are honoured to partner with the Arab Esports Federation under the leadership of its president, Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud. It is often said that youth own the future, and this is very much the case in the Middle East and Gulf countries where the majority of the 420 million Arabic-speaking population is under 35 who love gaming and chess, said John McRae, managing director of VADR and Checkmate.

The Arab Esports League has been very successful amongst our members. The addition of competitive online chess as an esports series enables greater access for the wider community to participate in a structured innovative and positive experience, said Al Taher. Our strategic alliance with Checkmate allows further opportunity to celebrate the diversity of the gaming community.

Checkmates take on chess will launch in Q1 2023 on Web and Mobile.

See the rest here:

The Arab Esports Federation moves into Web3 and launches online chess platform - Gulf Business

Since chess computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, artificial intelligence has held increasing sway over humans in a handful of 'adversarial' games - those in which human interaction plays a limited role. Now, however, a group of researchers have revealed a new AI that's attempting to expand the pool of games that a computer can beat you at.

In a paper (opens in new tab) published this week, researchers unveiled Cicero, an AI trained to win games of Diplomacy, a seven-player board game in which "each turn, all players engage in [...] free-form dialogue with the others during a negotiation period" before taking an action. That discussion phase is what sets Cicero's efforts apart from other AI.

The paper states that "almost all prior AI breakthroughs" have been in "two-player zero-sum" games, in which gaining an advantage for oneself puts the other player at a direct disadvantage. In those games - Chess, StarCraft, Go, and Poker - the AI can learn optimal strategy by playing against itself in a pattern known as 'self-play'. Eventually, it will come up with an approach that can't be beaten in a balanced game. In these examples, the complexity of the game itself isn't important; what matters is that communication isn't a central game mechanic, and that each action strives to set another player back in their goal.

That's not true of Diplomacy, a game in which conversation between players is important (if not entirely crucial), and in which making a gain does not necessarily harm an opponent. Here, self-play "produced uninterpretable language." That was a major obstacle to overcome, as anonymity was key to a fair experiment. Communication between players had to be grounded in the state of the game, or events that had already occurred, and if Cicero slipped up, the likelihood was that it would be found out due to its inability to explain its mistake.

Even more important, however, was the ability to build trust with fellow players. Theoretically, that concept would be alien to Cicero, but to succeed it would need to establish "an ability to reason about the beliefs, goals, and intentions of others" as well as "an ability to persuade and build relationships through dialogue."

To establish Cicero, researchers took a dataset of more than 40,000 dialogue-driven games of Diplomacy from an online version of the game. A base dialogue model was then trained on the Diplomacy chat logs, and then trained to predict messages based on an array of game data. Eventually, Cicero was trained to "exploit" the information in a message when deciding on its next action, while also reasoning what other players might be attempting to do.

Eventually, Cicero was entered anonymously into an online league that ran from August to October, 2022. It played in 40 games, ranking in the top 10% of those who played more than once, and coming second out of 19 players that played more than five games. Overall, Cicero was the tournament winner, with an average score more than double that of some of its 82 opponents.

It might not have been complete annihilation, but it was a tournament-winning effort for an AI laying some significant groundwork for similar, future efforts. For now, it might be limited to Diplomacy, but it strikes me that similar technology to Cicero could one day make its way to games like Settlers of Catan, or even social deduction video games like Town of Salem or Among Us. Now that would be sus.

Need to get some practice in ahead of our new AI overlords? Here are the best board games out there.

Go here to read the rest:

After chess and before our delicious brains, AI is coming for social strategy games and it's winning - Gamesradar

Lost films reappear from time to time and receive their critical due, places in the canon and, occasionally, a measure of popular acclamation. But seldom do we see a cinematic resurrection as astonishing and impressive as that of Mohammad Reza Aslanis Chess of the Wind. Met with critical hostility and audience indifference when it premiered in Tehran in 1976, the ravishing period drama was banned by the Islamic Republic and considered lost until 2014, when the directors son discovered a can containing a print of the film in a junk shop. Now restored under the aegis of Martin Scorseses World Cinema Project, it enters theaters this week as that unlikeliest of revelations:a nearly 50-year-old masterpiece virtually unknown till now.

A poet and production designer who had made short documentaries, Aslani was just 32 when he launched his narrative feature debut with Chess of the Wind (it was shown at last years New York Film Festival as Chess Game of the Wind, a title that makes a bit more sense). Perhaps if hed been older and more established, the film would have received a more attentive and appreciative reception, but its lack of contemporary renown still surprises, because even measured against the Iranian and international cinematic treasures of the 70s, Aslanis vision is still breathtakingly distinctive, an incisively devastating social critique embedded in a complex tale of intrigue, greed, oppression, and murder. The film is also, and perhaps most strikingly, a stylistic tour de force.

The story is set in the early 1920s, the last years of the Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since the 18th century and set new standards of decadence as its end approached. Aslanis film premiered three years before the end of the dynasty that succeeded the Qajars, the Pahlevis, and no doubt Iranian audiences would have understood that the earlier era was meant to implicate the decadence of the current monarchy. In fact, many Iranian films of the 1970s were rife with feelings of gloom, discontent, and dissidence; the shadow of a widely unpopular Shah seemed to loom over the most engaged and daring of his realms artists.

To conjure the Qajars world, the former production designer made the inspired decision to set the films story in a mansion which is almost a character itself, one of the films most important. Sand-colored, with high columns, doors, and windows decorated with bright stained glass, this archetypal Persian pile is not only where the drama occurs; its also, in a sense, what its aboutsince the family inside is in a state of rapid collapse, the house represents both an ungraspable vision of stability as well as the wealth that all crave.

Significantly, that family is without a paterfamilias when the tale begins. The person ostensibly in charge is a tall, dark-haired paraplegic, Lady Aghdas (a stunning performance by Fakhri Khorvash), who spends much of the drama in a large, very mobile wooden wheelchair. Aside from a sympathetic maid servant (the debut film performance of Shohreh Aghdashloo, who later starred in Kiarostamis The Report and won an Oscar nomination for House of Sand and Fog), the Lady is encircled by several human vultures due to the large fortune she has recently inherited from her mother. Chief among these predators is the imposing Hadji Amoo (Mohammad-Ali Keshavarz, the star of Kiarostamis Through the Olive Trees), the Ladys stepfather, who must contend with other male interlopers.

The world Chess of the Wind describes is a hierarchy, typical of sclerotic monarchies, as stratified as a layer cake. At the top are the formality-encased aristocrats, Lady Aghdas circle, including a group of ladies who look like wide-eyed exotic birds perched on a branch at a zoo. Beneath them are peoplemainly mentrying to boost their social status by any means necessary; they are the desperate, driven, thoughtlessly amoral prototypes of many middle-class climbers to come. At the bottom of the scale are servants, musicians, and laborers. Repeatedly throughout the film we see a group of washerwomen laundering clothes in a fountain in front of the mansion and commenting, Greek chorus-style, on the lives in their world; they seem as unhappy as their nominal betters, only for different reasons.

These scenes of the washerwomen are symmetrical compositions, filmed in static unbroken takes from a middle distance, with the mansions faade in the background. When were inside the mansion a similar visual strategy is employed. Aslanis camera often gazes straight-on at the mansions capacious entrance hall with its dual staircases. But however indebted these recurrent symmetrical compositions may be to traditional Persian painting, they also serve an ingenious purpose cinematic purpose since they offset and balance the elegant camera movements that evoke Alsanis admitted admiration for Max Ophls.

Visually, the film is a sumptuous feast from first frame till last. Inspired by Kubricks Barry Lyndon, Houshang Baharlous exquisitely nuanced color cinematography renders the luxurious interiors of the mansions upper floors solely by candlelight or natural light; here, the hues of polished woods, tan walls and expensive fabrics dominate. No less significant in the drama, the houses basement, the lair of crimes and secrets, is painted in hellish reds, purples and blacks. In all of these settings, Alsani uses the devicesuggesting a debt to Bressonof focusing closely on various objects like guns, pearls, or glass jars as they are handled by the characters. The technique, which seems to imbue the inanimate with its own spiritual potency, stresses the materiality of the forces that drive this family tragedy.

Although the twists and turns of the films story sometimes seem opaquethough repeated viewings bring out the dramas complexity and richnessone writer aptly noted that Chess of the Wind is image-driven rather than plot-driven. And the expressiveness of the films visual elements extends to its aural dimension. While the sound design brings a kind of materiality to the breaking of glass, the cawing of crows, and the ticking of clocks, the inventive score by noted composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi embeds hints of traditional Persian music within a startlingly modernistic sonic framework.

Chess of the Wind, which meditates on a society where traditional spiritual and social values are being displaced by a corrosive materialism, emerged from a remarkable decade of moviemaking, 1969-79, known as the Iranian New Wave (a term sometimes erroneously used to refer to more recent Iranian cinema). As Aslanis debts to Luchino Visconti and other Western filmmakers indicate, Iranian auteurs of that era were very aware of the most sophisticated currents in world cinema, even as they strove to develop their own individual and distinctively Persian vernaculars. Despite the brilliance of their work, they are still too little known outside Iran. Perhaps the surprise appearance of Chess of the Wind can lead to the rediscovery of a whole era of little-known masterpieces.

Now playing in select theaters.

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications.

93 minutes

The rest is here:

Chess of the Wind movie review (2021) - Roger Ebert

The Soul of Chess is the title of a new episode of FBI: International airing tonight (November 2) on CBS. Heres how the episode is described; some photos and a list of guest stars can be found below.

The team investigates an American journalists death by poison after his attempt to meet with an anonymous source in Poland. Also, Kellett takes Forrester to task for being overprotective with her during the mission, on the CBS Original series FBI: INTERNATIONAL, Tuesday, Nov. 2 (9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network, and available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+.

Picture 1 of 15

"The Soul of Chess" - The team investigates an American journalist's death by poison in after his attempt to meet with an anonymous source in Poland. Also, Kellett takes Forrester to task for being overprotective with her during the mission, on the CBS Original series FBI: INTERNATIONAL, Tuesday, Nov. 2 (9:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network and available to stream live and on demand on Paramount+.Pictured (L-R) Luke Kleintankas Special Agent Scott Forrester and Heida Reed as Special Agent Jamie KellettPhoto: Katalin Vermes CBS2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

FBI: International stars Luke Kleintank (Special Agent Scott Forrester), Heida Reed (Special Agent Jamie Kellett), Carter Redwood (Special Agent Andre Raines), Vinessa Vidotto (Special Agent Cameron Vo), and Christiane Paul (Europol Agent Katrin Jaeger).

Guest stars in The Soul of Chess include Magdalena Korpas (Alina Nowak), Aaron Serotsky (Michael Rafferty), Pawel Szajda (Alesky Zielinski), Toni Belafonte (Julianna Blake), Alexander Sokovikov (Piotr Efremov), Tom Hendryk (Henryk Galacki), Kumbi Mushambi (Philip Blake), Nicholas Gauci (Dasha), Jzsef Kovcs Molnr (Choir Director), and Lucas Kristf Halper (Polish Pedestrian).

Read this article:

FBI: International Tonight: "The Soul of Chess" - KSiteTV

There are thousands of games that can be played with a simple deck of cards, but Rob Halifax has found a way to make 52 cards even more versatile with a redesign that lets you play games like chess, checkers, and even d ominoes with the same deck that entertains you for hours on end with Solitaire.

The first thing you notice about the One Deck Game Cards is that the traditional suits and numbers have been pushed to the four corners of the cards. This makes room for additional graphics and symbols in the middle that allow them to be used for far more than just poker. There are small pip markings for dominoes, and chess piece symbols centered in red and black colored dots that also allows the cards to be used to play games like c heckers and backgammon.

The second thing youll notice is that the One Deck cards are no longer rectangular. Theyve instead been cropped to perfect squares (although remain the same width as regular cards), which allows them to be laid out in perfect grids for games like c hess and c heckers. The backs of each card feature a solid black design that can be used to fill in the missing squares of the checkered game board you create. (The white squares are simply the negative space left over.)

G/O Media may get a commission

$59 Off

AirPods Pro With MagSafe

Hear the difference The newly refreshed, 2021 AirPods Pro with MagSafe charging get their first big price cut.

The decks four Joker cards offer instructions on how to lay out and use the other cards for the games you dont typically play with a deck, including measurements so you know how big an area youll need to clean off on a table to accommodate each game. Backgammon could get a little tricky unless youre willing to draw your own game board to use beneath the cards, but the deck also features three sets of six-sided dice which can be endlessly shuffled and used in lieu of regular three-dimensional die.

Halifax has opted for a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help bring his unique One Deck design to gamers, with a modest funding goal of less than $3,000. The campaign has already well surpassed that. Pre ordering one of the decks requires a contribution of about $16 to the campaign with delivery expected sometime in April of next year. But the more decks you preorder, the cheaper the per deck cost gets, and it also expands the number of games you can potentially play.

The usual risks and caveats with crowdfunded products applies here, even for a game made from nothing but printed paper, but this is actually Halifaxs fourth Kickstarter product, and their second one based on playing cards, so they already have good relationships with printers and understand the risks and challenges that go along with it. Theyre also completely up front about the fact were still in the middle of a pandemic, with supply chain and shipping headaches getting worse. So consider the delivery date an ideal scenario, and be prepared for probable delays should you choose to back this Kickstarter.

Read this article:

This Cleverly Designed Deck of Cards Can Turn Into a Chess Board - Gizmodo

It's difficult to get a large group of chess players to agree on anything, and time controls are probably not the exception.Could the chess community come together, though, to select the best online time control from a short list of choices?

A while back, a Chess.com poll sought to answer this very question, and no single time control received more than 31 percent of the vote.

So let's add some totally subjective clarity to this question by ranking the options from worst to best. The criteria: solely my personal judgment.

Before we get started, a note on increments: They were not included in the poll options, and while they might be a good idea for super-grandmasters who've memorized complicated and esoteric endgames (like king-and-rook vs. king), I generally dislike them for online playbecause there is nothing sweeter than flagging your opponent in a hopeless position.

Two hours? I can't believe this is an option. It gives me a jolt of anxiety to even ponder the existence of a two-hour online time control.

Remember, chess time controls are for each side, so if you choose a two-hour game you could potentially be playing for four hours. Does your battery even last that long, or are you one of those aristocrats with plug-in chargers?

I choose to believe that the 10 percent of the Chess.com poll respondents who selected this option all misclicked. It's the only logical explanation.

Imagine you're playing such a game. You make a move and start watching reruns of The Office while your opponent thinks. You could potentially watch five full episodes before it's your move again. Sure, you were going to watch five Office reruns anyway, but that has nothing to do with chess.

This is a much more reasonable option if you want to play at a glacial pace. I don't think I've ever played a game this slowly, but I can see the appeal of having the luxury of deep analysis if one had the basic attention span necessary to perform it (clearly, I do not).

A 30-minute game will wrap up in an hour or less, which means you could play it on your lunch break if you don't mind eating at the same time.

With 30 minutes on your clock, you could even think about more than one candidate move as you play. I can only imagine that is a helpful thing.

This is a time control that isn't quite sure what it wants to be. It's pretty slow for blitz, but it's definitely still blitz. You're not likely to flag in a simple endgame, but you could find yourself in time trouble in a complicated middlegame.

Something just feels off about this time control. How quickly do you play the opening? Should you ever premove or even hover your pieces?

Listen, just because we have five fingers doesn't mean five minutes is a good time control for a chess game. I think this time control is much more suited to over-the-board blitz, where you have to toil mightily, moving physical pieces.

Save the five-minute games for the IRL tournament skittles room, once normal society resumes itself from the current apocalyptic hellscape.

Now this is an enjoyable online time control. You've got plenty of time to think, yet the game will conclude in no more than 20 minutes. It was the leading vote-getter in the poll, and it's not hard to understand why. 10-minute chess is just pleasant.

If you've made yourself a cup of coffee, this is the ideal game to sip and play. If you find your coffee growing cold, you've arrived at the endgame. That's probably in a chess textbook somewhere.

This is also a great time control for playing on mobile phones, where you don't really have to worry about if your opponent has the latest $200 laser gaming mouse to flag you. You could win byget thisactually playing better moves. It's a revolutionary concept, but it just might catch on.

True bullet chess. One minute. No increment. No fluff. No crying. Can you checkmate me in 60 seconds? Well, if you're GM Hikaru Nakamura, you definitely can.

But how many people reading this are Hikaru Nakamura? At most, one.

Traditionalists are eager to point out the degree of luck in one-minute chess, but luck is a strange word for what's really going on. Bullet chess combines not only tactics and strategy, but also speed, dexterity, daring and bluster.

The clock is as much a factor in bullet chess as the board and pieces. Would you rather be up 10 seconds in time or up a rook? I know what I'd prefer, and I am not telling you just in case we are ever matched in a bullet game together.

Besides, you can actually learn and improve your bullet chess skills. There is even a very helpful Chess.com video on how to flag your opponent.

This is the sweet spot for online chess. There's non-stop action, yet you have time to play a coherent game from start to finish.It's also one of the most liquid time control pools in online chess, so you just click that 3/0 button and within seconds you've got six minutes during which you don't have to think about your life. And isn't that what chess really is all about?

Three minutes seem designed for the game of online chess. You've got to move quickly, but you can't just make bad moves and hope to flag your opponent. That might work in bullet, but with three minutes, they'll figure out how to beat you.

Yet the beauty of three-minute chess is that a mistake isn't fatal. If you lose a pawn in a two-hour game, you might as well resign. But in three minutes, you can mount a comeback if you play sharp, aggressive, and strong moves.

Take a look at the Chess.com blitz leaderboard. Three-minute games are favored by the best players in the world, and for good reason.

The next time you start a game of three-minute chess, take a moment to savor the fact that you're playing the best possible online chess time control. But don't savor it too longafter all, you've got just three minutes.

Link:

What Is The Best Online Chess Time Control? - Chess.com

Chess became a source of inspiration in the arts in literature soon after the spread of the game to the Middle East and Europe in the Middle Ages. And it continues to command a formative impact on the arts today.

Chess creates a magical, imaginative narrative with powerful characters and drama, filled with great loss but also great triumphs. For centuries, artists have used chess as their muse to create paintings, sculptures and literature. Some have even created elaborate physical chess sets. Lets examine some of the most famous artists, pieces and chess integrations across genres:

But the influence chess has on art isnt a one-way street. Sometimes, its the other way around. Purling London, a British luxury game company critically acclaimed for its unique boards and artistic renderings, regularly collaborates with well-known artists including Sophie Matisse, Mr. Doodle, Inkie and Thierry Noir to create contemporary chess masterpieces.

While chess-art aficionados can peruse many of the great pieces in museums and in galleries across the world, perhaps one of the best national treasures is the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis, which presents world-class exhibitions that explore the connection of chess to art, culture and history.

The World Chess Hall of Fame (WCHOF) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to building awareness of the cultural and artistic significance of chess. Housed in an historic 15,900 square-foot residence-turned-business, the WCHOF features World Chess Hall of Fame inductees, United States Chess Hall of Fame inductees selected by the U.S. Chess Trust, displays of artifacts from the permanent collection and exhibitions highlighting the great players, historic games and rich cultural history of chess.

Originally posted here:

On Chess: Chess And The Arts - St. Louis Public Radio

NOTE: Chess.com has now reverted all ratingadjustments referred to in this announcement. We appreciate all of the community feedback and are considering it carefully going forward

Today, Chess.com made two significant changes to our Daily Chess rating system. First,all Daily Chess Standard ratings above 1500 have been increased by different amounts. Second, all Daily960 ratings above 1300 have been increased by different amounts.

After lots of statistical analysis of our Daily Chess ratings and comparisons to our other ratings, we have determined that increasing the ratings for players in specific ranges is the best way to achieve more accurate ratings for players in these rating pools. This change will bring the average Daily Chess rating on Chess.com in line with current Blitz Chess ratings on site.

Here is an exact breakdown of how ratings will be adjusted.

Daily Chess Rating Adjustment

Daily960 Rating Adjustment

*NOTE: If you don't see these rating updates yet, please be patient. It should process for you in the next day or two.

See the article here:

Daily Chess Ratings And Daily960 Ratings Adjusted - Chess.com

This week we figure out how tall the very big lady from Resident Evil Village is, flip out a Bernie chair, learn what games will be free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers this month, buy 900lbs of PlayStation consoles and check in on chess YouTube in 2021.

I cant wait for this MOBA to become really popular and spawn a mod that then spawns a MOBA that then spawns a new auto chess game that then spawns a card game that then spawns...

G/O Media may get a commission

2-Pack: Juku STEAM Coding Kits

This is why Im proud to work at Kotaku. We do the real work.

What would you rather have? 912lbs of PlayStation consoles or $240 worth of pudding?

There was a lot of good (and bad!) Bernie memes created this past week. This is the best.

I would play more chess if the pieces were people and shot lasers. I think what I want is laser tag, actually. Yes. Thats what I want. Never mind. (Original video here!)

Okay, no more Bernie memes. The new cool thing is remixing this song.

.

Here is the original post:

Chess Looks Wild In 2021 - Kotaku

American GMs Fabiano Caruana and Wesley So haveconfirmed their participation in the2021Grand Chess Tour,which returnsafter its cancellationlast yeardue to the global pandemic.

TheU.S. stars join eight other world elite as full-tour participants in the2021GCTschedule, whichfollows the same five-tournament format originally planned for lastseason. Theinternational tourfeatures two classical tournaments with prize funds of $325,000 each,including the kickoff event in Romania in June and the tour finale Sinquefield Cup in St. Louisin August,bookendingthree rapid and blitz events with prize funds of $150,000.

We are excited to return to over the board events this year, said MichaelKhodarkovsky, executive director for the GCT. All five event locations will comply with local COVID-19 guidelines and fans can expect the same excitement and action that they have come to love and enjoy from theGrand Chess Tour.

The full schedule for the 2021 GCT season is as follows:

SuperbetChess Classic Romania: June 3-15, 2021 in Bucharest, Romania

Paris Rapid & Blitz: June 16-23, 2021 in Paris, France

Croatia Rapid & Blitz: July 5-12, 2021 in Zagreb, Croatia

St. Louis Rapid & Blitz: August 9-16, 2021 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Sinquefield Cup: August 16-28, 2021 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

There will be no GCT finals tournamentlike there was in 2019, which took placewithin the London Chess Classic. Instead, the final tour standings will be decided based ontourpoints accumulated over thefive 2021 events. A bonus prize fund of $175,000 will be awarded to the top three overall GCT finishers.

Invitations for the 2021 tour were extended to those who had qualified for2020,including China GM Ding Liren who won the 2019tour.Missing this year isWorld Champion GM Magnus Carlsen and American GM Hikaru Nakamura, who bothelected not to participate as full tourparticipants.They were replaced by Azerbaijani GMsShakhriyarMamedyarovandTeimourRadjabov, who makes his GCT debut.

The ten full-tour participants for the 2021 GCT is as follows:

These ten participants will play in both classical events and two of the three rapid and blitz tournaments.An additional ten wildcards will be extended to selected players to participate in those Paris, Zagreb and St. Louis events. For more information, visit the Grand Chess Tour website.

Read this article:

Grand Chess Tour Returning in Summer 2021 | US Chess.org - uschess.org