FIDE Grand Prix 2017

The FIDE Grand Prix 2017 will be a series of four chess tournaments that form part of the qualification cycle for the World Chess Championship 2018. The top two finishers will qualify for the 2018 Candidates Tournament.

Format

There are four tournaments in the cycle; each will consist of 18 players. 24 players will be selected to compete in the tournaments, and each player will compete in three of the four tournaments.^[1]

In contrast to the previous editions where players played a full round-robin, each tournament will now be an 18-player, nine-round Swiss system tournament. In each round players will score 1 point for a win, ½ point for a draw and 0 for a loss. Grand Prix points will then be allocated according to each player's standing in the tournament, as shown in the table below.

Players

The Grand Prix consists of 24 players. Two players qualified from being finalists in the World Chess Championship 2014 match; four players qualified from reaching the semifinals of the Chess World Cup 2015, eight players will qualify based on rating; one player will qualify from participation in the Association of Chess Professionals, and finally nine players rated at least 2700 will be nominated by Agon and FIDE.^[2]

In an interview with Chessdom (Aug 2016), Zurab Azmaiparashvili (president of the European Chess Union) indicated various plusses and minuses with the new system, particularly that he considered the nine "wild card" entries were less expensive than in previous versions.^[3] However, with few details currently available and maybe questions unanswered, he also was unsure of the professionality of Agon's approach.^[3]

At the FIDE General Assembly in September, Agon presented Vladimir Kramnik as having Russia as a national sponsor, which if true would be the first time that he has participated in the FIDE Grand Prix.^[4]

Any player who declines to participate in the Grand Prix will be replaced by another player who is rated over 2700.

Invitee	Country	Qualifying method
Magnus Carlsen	Norway	World Chess Championship 2014
Viswanathan Anand	India
Sergey Karjakin	Russia	Chess World Cup 2015
Peter Svidler	Russia
Pavel Eljanov	Ukraine
Anish Giri	Netherlands
Hikaru Nakamura	United States	FIDE rating list (from June 2015 to May 2016)
Fabiano Caruana	United States
Veselin Topalov	Bulgaria
Vladimir Kramnik	Russia
Levon Aronian	Armenia
Wesley So	United States
Ding Liren	China
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave	France
Evgeny Tomashevsky	Russia	ACP Tour ranking
TBD		organiser's nominees
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD

Prize money and Grand Prix points

The total prize money is €130,000 per single Grand Prix, or €520,000 for the total Grand Prix series. This money is allocated based on ranking in each individual tournament. ^[5]

Additionally, each player who can recruit a sponsor will receive €20,000.

Tie breaks

With the objective of determining qualifiers to play in the Candidates 2018, and in the case that two or more players have equal cumulative points at the top, the following criteria were utilized to decide the overall Series winner and other overall placings:^[5]

1. Number of actual game result points scored in the three tournaments entered.
2. Number of games played with black.
3. Number of wins.
4. Number of black wins.
5. Drawing of lots.

Schedule

Originally the first event was to take place in Oct 2016, but this has been moved to Nov 2017, with the other dates mostly the same.^[6][7]

No.	Host city	Date	Winners	Points (win/draw/loss)
1	Sharjah	17 – 28 February 2017
2	Moscow	11 – 22 May 2017
3	Geneva	5 – 16 July 2017
4	Palma, Majorca	8 – 19 November 2017

Originally the 3nd Grand Prix (now the 2nd) was to conflict with the World Team Chess Championship, but now that event has been moved to June where it instead conflicts with the Grand Chess Tour events and Norway Chess.

References