Paris Chess Grand Prix begins Sept 21

Chess Blog for Daily Chess News and Trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hi everyone, 

The final tournament in the Chess Grand Prix series 2012/13 begins today in Paris. Three players of the twelve participants: Sergey Karjakin, Peter Svidler and Teimour Radjabov, stepped out of the tournament, being replaced by: Evgeny Tomashevsky, Etienne Bacrot and Laurent Fressinet. Therefore, the current and final starting list would be:

Bacrot, Etienne: the former child prodigy remains one of the strongest French players and promises to satisfy the locals demands with an honorable spot in the final standings;

Caruana, Fabiano: had a meteoric rise in the past year, winning several big tournaments with his versatile playing style; currently he is one of the two players from this tournament (next to Grischuk) with a chance to make it to the Candidates event if he will grab the first place unshared;


Dominguez, Perez Leinier: coming from a country where chess is enormously popular, the country of Capablanca, the Cuban player proved his class by winning one of the previous GP editions, the strong Thessaloniki event; he has now the highest rating of his career, 2757;


Fressinet, Laurent: in the past few years he established himself as a 2700+ player and recently won the Men's Rapid at SportAccord World Mind Games in Beijing;


Gelfand, Boris: has been around on top level chess for more than 25 years – a classical player with a phenomenal weaponry; he recently had a peak in his career when he qualified for the World Championship match against Anand, who only managed to defeat him by winning the tiebreak; the 8th Tal Memorial of this year was also won by Boris, so we shall see if experience will again prevail over the youth impetus;


Giri, Anish: for the Dutch prodigy, the GP series is a wonderful launching platform on his way to the very top, because Anish aims for nothing less than his abilities;


Grischuk, Alexander: in a shoulder to shoulder combat, Grischuk is the second contender for the final spot in the Candidates event, under the same clause as Caruana: to win unshared in Paris; as a versed player in the Candidates: Mexico (2007) and Kazan (2011) – the Russian time-trouble lover will be an interesting player to be watched;


Ivanchuk Vassily: alias “Chucky” is a rather unpredictable and very original player, who, if in his best shape, can literally beat anyone in the world!; needles to mention his provocative but multilateral playing style, with a proverbial memory and always in search of the truth;


Nakamura Hikaru: the American proves that he can (!), with his very ambitious and aggressive style;


Ponomariov Ruslan: former world champion and one of the youngest GM in the history, the Ukrainian amazes with his branded skills of getting water out of stone, in some of what other people would regard as the most deserted positions;


Tomashevsky Evgeny: is in great shape, as we could see from his amazing fighting skills in the World Cup, where he eliminated Aronian, Morozevich and Kamsky! He only lost against Dmitry Andreikin; had he won, he would have been qualified for the Candidates already!


Wang Hao: the strongest Chinese player at the moment, Wang Hao has the fame of being able to upset the top class elite, as he showed to all of us this year in his beautiful wins against Carlsen in Norway and twice Anand (Norway + Wijk Aan Zee);

If only Caruana and Grischuk have the chance to outrun Mamedyarov, to join Topalov in the next Candidates event, what will be other players fighting for, besides glory, rating points and the mere pleasure of playing chess?

Money is quite a good motivation trigger, so the prizes of 240 000 Euros is not an insignificant amount, with the specification that 170k will be paid out after the event and 70k will be going to the accumulated prize fund of 420k, which will go to top ten players overall.

PRIZE € (Euros) GP PTS
1st 25,000 120+50
2nd 22,500 110+30
3rd 20,000 100+10
4th 17,500 90
5th 15,000 80
6th 13,000 70
7th 12,000 60
8th 11,000 50
9th 10,000 40
10th 9,000 30
11th 8,000 20
12th 7,000 10

Excerpted from a nice detailed pre-tournament report by WGM Alina l'Ami at the official website.

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