Friday, February 19, 2016

Pestaño: Big chess festival starts in Gen San

THE Bobby Pacquiao Random Chess Festival will take place tomorrow until Wednesday at the SM Mall of General Santos City with P2 million in cash prizes.
Bobby is a brother of Manny Pacquiao and is reportedly running for congressman as Manny will be running for senator. He is also a former boxer.
Organized by the Eugene Torre Chess Foundation, this festival is sanctioned by the National Chess Federation of the Philippines and is open to members of good standing only. Players with ratings of 1799 and below and unrated players will be given a provisional rating of 1800 for calculation purposes only. Ratings will be based as of the Jan. 1 list of NCFP and FIDE.
There will be three different tournaments all with Random format. The team event has a total prize of P1.6 million and will be held first on Saturday and Sunday. This will be followed by a rapid individual event on Monday and Tuesday and a blitz event on Wednesday with total prizes of P400,000.
Each team will have four players and their average Elo must not exceed 2100.Each team can have one grandmaster and three non-masters, or one international master with three non-masters.
Other options for a team is to have two Fide Masters and two non-masters, two National Masters and two non-masters, one Fide Master and one national master and two non-masters and four non-masters.
Scoring system of the team event is match point, meaning two points for a win, one point for a draw and nil for a loss.
Prizes for the team event are P500,000 for the champion plus trophy, P280,000 for the second placer and P170,000 for the third placer. Those who make the top 10 will earn at least P10,000, while those who make the top 50 will also get prizes.
The rapid individual event will follow on Feb. 24 and 25 and a blitz contest on Feb. 26. The Individual Rapid champion will get P60,000 plus trophy, while the second and third placers get P35,000 and P20,000, respectively.
There will also be prizes for 11th to 50th placers and special prizes for top Gen. San player, top ladies and top seniors.
The Blitz event will offer P20,000,12,000 and P8,000 to the top players.
In case of ties there will be pooling of prizes for first to fifth places. For sixth to 50th places, there will be no pooling of prizes and tiebreaks will decide. This will be true for the team event and individual prizes.
Registration fee is P2,000 per team and P200 for individual competition. Time control is one hour and 50 minutes plus 10 seconds for each player, play to finish, for the team event. Format is nine rounds Swiss.
WORLD CHESS CYCLE. The Candidates Tournament will determine the challenger for the World Chess Championship against the reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a match scheduled for November 2016.
FIDE and Agon, its commercial partner, are organizing the Candidates Chess Tournament 2016 in Moscow from March 10 to 30.
The first round will see an all Russian and all American pairings--Sergey Karjakin (winner of World Cup) vs. Peter Svidler (runner-up World Cup) and Hikaru Nakamura (Grand Prix qualifier) vs. Fabiano Caruana (Grand Prix qualifier). The other two encounters of the day will be Anish Giri (by rating) vs. Levon Aronian (by rating) and a repeat of the 2010 World Chess Championship Viswanathan Anand ( loser of previous championship) vs. Veselin Topalov (Organizers nominee).

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