Carlsen To Play In FIDE Online World Corporate Chess Championship

The FIDE Online World Corporate Chess Championship will be held February 19-21, 2021. The first edition of the championship has big names such as GMs Magnus Carlsen, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Vladislav Artemiev, and Anish Giri among the participants.

The inaugural edition of the FIDE Online World Corporate Chess Championship, an online team competition for companies, has a surprisingly large and strong turnout. With a total of 284 teams from 78 different countries registered, the event will bring together 1,467 players. 

The list of participating companies includes giants like Amazon, Samsung, Ford, Microsoft, Gazprom, Facebook, Siemens, Dell Technologies, Bosch, Airbus, IBM, Boeing, Sony, Intel, ArcelorMittal, Equinor, HP, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Vodafone, Sberbank, American Express, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Oracle, Credit Suisse, and Airbnb.

The line-ups of the teams are fairly impressive as well. Especially nice is the participation of the world champion, who represents the company Kindred, the online gambling operator of e.g. Unibet that has been sponsoring Carlsen since early 2020. Giri is logically playing for Optiver, a Dutch trading firm that has supported him during the past five years of his career.

Other top players are playing by invitation as companies were allowed to have one invited player for the event. In total, 204 titled players will take part in the competition, including 36 grandmasters.

Top 10 participants

There are also some top executives playing for their teams, like Bernhard Spalt, CEO of Erste Group Bank, and Tomislav Topic, who is the CEO of the telecom company Telconet in Ecuador.

However, the strongest executive is the two-time French champion and former top player GM Joel Lautier, a member of the Supervisory Board of Sovcombank, who will make a temporary comeback to play in the championship.

Format

Each team consists of four players, including at least one male player and at least one female player. In each team, only one player can have a standard rating higher than 2500 in the FIDE rating list for November 2020.

Registered teams are divided into two pools (East & West) of approximately equal strength and of close time zones. Pool matches are played on February 19 and 20. Qualified teams enter the playoff phase, played on February 21.

The Eastern pool matches begin at 7 a.m. Pacific (16:00 CET). The Western pool matches begin at 5:30 p.m. Pacific (2:30 a.m. the next day CET). The time control is 10 minutes plus a 2-second increment for the whole game.

Donations

There was no entry fee of any kind for this competition. However, FIDE is organizing a fund-raiser in cooperation with the platform Softgiving , and participating companies are encouraged to donate towards one of three social projects currently being developed by FIDE: Chess in Education programs for underprivileged children, Chess for people with Disabilities, and the FIDE veterans support program. If you also want to contribute, you can do it through this link:

https://give.softgiving.com/FIDE

All donations received through this link will count towards the leaderboard offered by Softgiving. The most generous donors will appear on top of the leaderboard (donation amounts won't be revealed).

At the end of the event, the team that has donated the most funds for those charity causes will be invited to the FIDE World Championship Match 2021, taking place at Dubai World Expo in late 2021, with accommodation expenses covered for three nights and VIP tickets to attend three rounds of the match.

Update Feb. 17, 2021: An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that GM Johan Hellsten is the CEO of Telconet.