World Chess (LSE: CHSS) continues its Armageddon Championship Series with the Women’s Week, featuring eight of the world’s top female chess players in a high-stakes tournament to be held in Berlin from May 8 to May 14, 2023. This seven-day event promises to be a thrilling showcase of skill, strategy, and nail-biting drama.

The tournament will feature top-ranked players Alexandra Kosteniuk (Switzerland, blitz rating 2453, Humpy Koneru (India, blitz rating 2448), Bibisara Assaubayeva (Kazakhstan, blitz rating 2461), Sara Khadem (Iran, blitz rating 2417), Nana Dzagnidze (Georgia, blitz rating 2416), Gunay Mammadzada (Azerbaijan, blitz 2408), Alina Kashlinskaya (Poland, blitz rating 2382), and Elisabeth Paehtz** (Germany, blitz rating 2342).

They will battle it out in a double-elimination format with daily matches consisting of two blitz games with the potential for an additional Armageddon game if a victory does not emerge. The competitors will vie for an equal male category prize fund of €50,000 and the two available spots in the Grand Finale, where the qualifiers will battle it out for the €200,000 main prize.

The overarching aim of the week is not only to promote women in chess but to also reinforce our commitment to equality through the fairer distribution of prizes across the men’s and women’s matches. The winners of the tournament will go on to compete against male players, including Wesley So, Sam Shankland, Gukesh D, and Nodirbek Abdusattorov — marking a dramatic, but overdue, moment in the sport’s history.

Ilya Merenzon, CEO of World Chess, said: “For chess to grow and thrive, it needs to do more to attract female players. Chess remains a male-dominated sport, but World Chess is committed to changing this by promoting and creating welcoming environments where women can also compete against their male counterparts. We are thrilled to have this incredible female line-up at the upcoming Armageddon Week and believe it will be as spectacular and impactful as the plot of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, whilst helping to inspire a new generation of female players.”
The tournament will follow a dramatic format, with a real-time heartbeat display, frantic time controls, calories burned, and breakneck moves all adding to the excitement. Fans can watch the action with cutting-edge analysis by Grandmaster Simon Williams and International Master Jovanka Houska every day at 19:00 CET on over 17 television channels worldwide, as well as on World Chess’ official YouTube channel.

For the first few days, the players were divided into pairs as follows:

Day 1:
Elisabeth Paehtz — Gunay Mammadzada
Sara Khadem — Alina Kashlinskaya

Day 2:
Alexandra Kosteniuk — Humpy Koneru
Bibisara Assaubayeva — Nana Dzagnidze

The pairings will be established using the double-elimination system and will be determined by the results of the previous days.

May’s battle is set to be an unforgettable event for chess fans everywhere. Stay tuned for updates and highlights from the Armageddon Championship Series: Women’s Week, only from World Chess.

Leading partners supporting the Armageddon Championship Series:

Kaspersky is the Official Cybersecurity Partner;
FIDE Online Arena is the Official Gaming Platform;
The it.com domains is the Official Partner.

Armageddon Day 1

World Chess team joins the chess world in congratulating Ding Liren on becoming the 17th World Chess Champion. It was a pleasure to be a part of your chess journey!

Photos: World Chess

World Chess Plc, a company that reinvents chess for 21st-century users, is listed on London Stock Exchange’s main market under the ticker symbol ‘CHSS’. ‘That was the closest to CHESS as we could get given that ticker symbols have only four letters,’ — said Ilya Merenzon, World Chess CEO.

‘We are very excited to join LSE and become a new chapter as a public company,’ added Merenzon: “It means a new level of responsibility to the users, investors, and partners, and also a new level of transparency. We are keen to work with the users and chess players and fans to take this journey together”.

Read the official listing announcement.

World Chess, a global gaming company, will from now on plant a tree for each chess set sold. Beautiful chess sets and beautiful forests can co-exist.

World Chess Championship set

This environment-conscious initiative is a collaboration with One Tree Planted, a nonprofit dedicated to global reforestation. The main goal is to plant 10,000 trees over the next 5 years, restoring deforested and fire-affected areas. For every chess set purchased, World Chess will plant one tree in India where its main manufacturing site is located.

“We will plant a tree and help restore forests for every wooden chess set sold by World Chess and its partners around the world. It’s important to us, and it’s important to our customers. We will also continue using sustainable materials since It has always been important for World Chess to be sustainable and to use wood that is already harvested by the Indian government for their use. In other cases, the trees are sometimes so old that they have to be cut down and replanted, ‘ said the CEO of World Chess Ilya Merenzon.

According to the globalforestwatch.org research, India lost 376kha of tree cover from 2001 to 2021, equivalent to a 3.7% decrease in forestation since 2000, and 204Mt of CO₂e emissions. The objectives of this partnership include supporting India’s reforestation efforts, empowering our partners and customers to act sustainably, and raising awareness of the importance of ecosystem rehabilitation.

Planting trees is one of the best ways to combat the damaging impacts of climate change. Trees clean our air and water, create habitat for biodiversity, contribute to our health and well-being, and create jobs for social impact.

The World Chess x One Tree Planted partnership is designed to simplify customer participation in global reforestation. For every chess set sold at the World Chess Shop, the company will make a donation to One Tree Planted equivalent to the cost of planting one tree. The trees will be planted by local partner organizations and community volunteers in areas where deforestation has occurred. World Chess will also monitor the effort and will keep its partners and customers informed.

FIDE Online Arena, the official gaming platform of the International Chess Federation, advances personal health in e-sport by introducing a new feature to measure calories burned by playing online.

Starting from today, FIDE Online Arena, the official FIDE gaming platform, which is operated by World Chess, will track and display the calories users burn during an online game of chess. Whilst calorie tracking is already widely used across offline fitness and sports, including chess, it has not previously been used as a feature in e-sports.

FIDE Online Arena is hoping that calorie tracking in e-sports will spread and there will be increasing encouragement for healthier lifestyle decisions. After each online chess game, which can last anywhere from 30 seconds to 45 minutes, an estimated number of calories burned during the game will appear alongside the game results. Players will also be able to track cumulative calories burned over a week, month, or even a year. During an average 5-minute game, an online player will typically burn only 4 calories, but with online players often playing many games the cumulative total can build rapidly.

This is thought to be the first time in online sports that athletes and casual players alike can access their calorie expenditure insights and trends using an integrated calorie calculator. The FIDE Online Arena has developed a unique and innovative tracking module that takes into account multiple key indicators including but not limited to, the player’s weight, height, and age (if known) as well as the speed of play, time, game intensity and the difficulty of each game.

Whilst this is a first for e-sport, in 2019, ESPN released surprising data relating to in-person chess. The published data concluded that chess players can use up to 6,000 calories a day during an in-person tournament, three times more than an average person consumes in an entire day. The study took into account research on calorie consumption and calories burnt by physical exertion and heightened mental activity.

Ilya Merenzon, CEO of World Chess, commented: “Supporting good health, both physical and mental, is hugely important, especially in modern societies which face the challenge of increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Therefore we are excited that FIDE Online Arena is using the latest technology and understanding of physiology to promote physical health for chess players around the world.

‘The research findings about the calories burned during chess reinforce the status of  chess as a physical as well as an intellectual challenge, a global sport that is good for your mind and also your body.’

Chess prodigy Arjun Erigaisi is making history as he signs a groundbreaking sponsorship deal with Singapore-based Quantbox.

Photo: Lennart Ootes/Tata Steel Chess India

This five-year contract, worth over $1.5 million, marks the first-ever sponsorship of the Grandmaster from Telangana, and could be a major boost to his professional career. For Erigaisi, 2022 has been a breakthrough year as he has consistently improved his game, earning him a strong rank of 26th in the world by classical score. This sponsorship is the biggest of its kind in the history of Indian chess.

The International Chess Federation recently released the requirements for the 2024 Candidates’ Tournament.

Photo: World Chess (Candidates Tournament 2018 in Berlin)

“The main innovation is creating a new qualification path through different FIDE-rated tournaments. Tournaments that meet certain criteria, like being played under standard time control, supervised by International Arbiters, and where Fair Play measures are applied (among other criteria listed below in detail), will grant points towards the ‘FIDE Circuit’. The player with more points at the end of 2023 will get the coveted spot in the most prestigious of all chess tournaments.”

The competition will feature:

• The loser of the FIDE World Championship Match (Ian Nepomniachtchi or Ding Liren);
• The three top players from the World Cup 2023;
• The two best players by FIDE Grand Swiss Tournament standings;
• The top-performing player in FIDE tournaments in 2023 who has not yet been chosen;
• The highest-ranked player in the Classic in January 2024 who has not already been selected.

After Arjun Erigaisi signed a $1.5 Million Sponsorship Deal with Quantbox, another Indian prodigy, GM Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa signs with Baseline Ventures for Commercial Representation.

Photo: Lennart Ootes

The past years, India has seen a great rise of young talents in chess including Arjun Erigaisi, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, Nihal Sarin, and Dommaraju Gukesh. Indeed, a bit more than 10 days ago Arjun Erigaisi made history as he signed a $1.5 Million sponsorship deal with Singapore-based Quantbox to mark the beginning of a major boost to his professional career.

Today Baseline Ventures announced that they signed Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa to represent him in all commercial aspects. Pragg is the fourth-youngest Grandmaster in the history of chess with remarkable performances including wins against Magnus Carlsen.

The MD & Co-founder of Baseline Ventures, Tuhin Mishra, welcomed Praggnanandhaa, saying that “ Praggnanandhaa’s accomplishments as a 17-year-old are just the beginning. He is undoubtedly an exceptional talent with the potential to become a sporting sensation who can take the country by storm.”

“I am thrilled to have signed with Baseline Ventures and am looking forward to how it will benefit my career. It is imperative that every athlete today has the right representation, and having the right people around me to handle the commercial aspects would be positive for my career” said Praggnanandhaa.

Most people can’t even imagine how much money elite chess players earn – only from tournament prizes let alone streaming and other business activities – per year but Nathaniel Green published an article on chesscom revealing that 3 GMs made more than 500k in 2022, and 17 GMs between $100-450k with only one woman on this list.

Photo: World Chess

It’s not hard to imagine that No.1 on this list is Magnus Carlsen. The winner of the Champions Chess Tour, Norway Chess, and both the World Rapid and Blitz Championships earned nearly $560k in major tournament prizes throughout 2022. With a $100 million libel lawsuit on his back by Hans Niemann, and after withdrawing from the World Championship title with a $2M prize fund though, Magnus might find himself in an uncomfortable financial position.

Second on the list and very close to Magnus is Wesley So who brought in just over $540,000 worth of prize money in 2022 after getting the first prize at Chesscom Global Championship worth of $200,000.

Third but for sure not least is the professional streamer and superstar Hikaru Nakamura, who ended the year with a bit more than $515k. Six months ago though El Pais has published an article claiming that Nakamura is the world’s wealthiest chess player with a an estimated fortune somewhere around $50 million!

Moving lower on the list there are 17 more GMs who earned more than 100k, with GM Tan Zhongyi being the only woman, and 17-year-old Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu being the youngest on the list. Check them out:

Ian Nepomniachtchi – $429,512
Alireza Firouzja – $358,542
Jan-Krzysztof Duda – $296,178
Fabiano Caruana – $263,810
Levon Aronian – $260,136
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave – $234,904
Anish Giri – $213,061
Shakhriyar Mamedyarov – $201,834
Ding Liren – $175,540
Richard Rapport – $166,938
Le Quang Liem – $134,500
Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu – $129,000
Nihal Sarin – $118,802
Dmitry Andreikin – $112,861
Vladimir Fedoseev - $109,405
Leinier Dominguez – $109,391
Tan Zhongyi – $103,753

Read the original article here

World Chess Plc, a leading chess organisation seeking to promote the mass market appeal of chess globally through the commercial offering of chess related activities, is pleased to announce its intention to seek admission of its Ordinary Shares to the Official List and to trading on the London Stock Exchange’s Main Market for listed securities, and a placing of new shares to raise up to £10m.

It is expected that the Admission will become effective and that dealings will commence in November 2022, under the ticker CHSS. Novum Securities Limited (“Novum”) is acting as Financial Adviser to the Company and Retail investors will be able to register their interest in the IPO by applying through PrimaryBid prior to Admission.

Ilya Merenzon, Chief Executive Officer of World Chess, said: “I am pleased to be announcing our intention to float on the London market at a transformational time for chess and for our business. There continues to be an explosion of interest in chess, which has accelerated through recent years and even more during the pandemic. To keep pace with this growth we are scaling up our operations and expanding our range of services internationally. We are hugely passionate about chess and can’t wait to take the next step in developing the sport that looks like a hybrid of e-sports with a Nobel prize awards ceremony.”

The Times News