THE London Chess Classic tournament, the last in this year’s Grand Chess Tour, starts today in Kensington, London and ends on Dec. 13.
The Grand Chess Tour was created with one goal in mind: to have a circuit of international events, each demonstrating the highest level of organization for the world’s best players.
The 2015 Tour is a partnership between the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (Sinquefield Cup), Tower AS (Norway Chess 2015) and Chess Promotions, Ltd. (London Chess Classic). The legendary Garry Kasparov inspired the Grand Chess Tour and helped solidify the partnership between the organizers.
Each of the three 2015 Grand Chess Tour events will award individual prize funds of $300,000, with competitors also tallying points toward a tour prize fund of $150,000. The overall tour champion will receive an additional $75,000. The total prize fund for the circuit is $1,050,000.
There are nine participants, who are the same entries in each event, Magnus Carlsen, Vishy Anand, Veselin Topalov, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk, Levon Aronian and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. The wild card in London is Michael Adams.
The tournament has seven of the top 10 players as of the December FIDE rating list, and the world No.s 11, 17 and 20. The first leg of the Grand Chess Tour, Norway Chess, was won by Veselin Topalov. The second tournament in the series, the Sinquefield Cup, was won by Levon Aronian.
The time control for each tournament in the Tour is 40 moves in two hours, followed by the rest of the game in 1 hour with a 30-second increment from move 41.
Here are the earnings after two legs among the participants: Topalov ($90,000), Aronian ($90,000), Nakamura ($80,000), Anand ($65,000), Carlsen ($55,000), Giri ($55,000), Lagrave ($50,000), Caruana ($40,000), Grischuk ($35,000).
The wild card entry in Norway Jon Ludwig Hammer earned $15,000 while Wesley So also earned $15,000 as the wild card entry in Sinquefield.
Rogelio Antonio Jr. was awarded the GM title in 1993 and is affectionately known as GM Joey. He became the first player in the Philippines’ history to qualify for the World Cup in 2009 and also won the National Championship 13 times! Joey has also played in 10 Olympiads in Board 2 behind Torre. Joey’s tally in the Olympiad has never fallen below 50 percent and in 2000 at Istanbul, he scored 7/10 with a performance rating of 2682.
I am featuring him here because he was recently featured and interviewed in chess.com for having played 105,874 games in six years! Probably the most by any player in the world! Here is part of the interview.
Did you have any celebration when you got to 100,000 games? It will be much appreciated if you can give me recognition for the largest number of games in your site. I would like to add that I believe that I have the most numbers of checkmates.
Who are some of the biggest names you’ve beaten on Chess.com? Well I think GM Hikaru Nakamura of USA. I beat him three games and I lost two games in blitz. We also played two games over the board and they were both draws.
You’ve played with Eugenio Torre many times. What have you learned from him? Well I learned a lot from the icon of chess in the Philippines.
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