2nd ACP Cup Announced

The 2nd ACP World Cup is announced

On August 2, 2007 the President of the Association of Chess Professionals (ACP), Grandmaster Pavel Tregubov and the Chairman of the Pivdenny Bank, Vadim Morokhovsky announced at the press conference in Odessa, Ukraine that Odessa will host also the second ACP World Cup.

The first ACP World Cup was organised by the Pivdenny Bank in January 2007: Peter Leko won it after defeating Vasyl Ivanchuk in the final match.

Pavel Tregubov said that there will be no significant changes in the event’s formula: 16 players will compete in the KO Rapid tournament. The list of the 13 players who qualified to the second ACP World Cup from the ACP Tour 2006/2007 can be found at the official ACP web site, chess-players.org. Eight of these 13 qualifiers are current FIDE top ten players. Three players will be given Wild Cards. Vadim Morokhovsky said that it is possible that one of these three entries will be given to a local grandmaster, but the decision is not made as of yet.

Contracts with players should be signed in October 2007. The exact dates and venue of the tournament are to be announced later. It is possible that the event will take place from 3-7 January 2008 in the Londonskaya Hotel, which was the venue of the first ACP Cup. According to Morokhovsky, the prize fund of the ACP World Cup will again be higher than 100,000 US Dollars. Morokhovsky expressed the hope that all the top grandmasters who have the right to play will participate. He added that the organisers had already begun to contact players.

When asked by a local journalist, the Chairman of the Pivdenny Bank named various goals of sponsoring top chess events, such as: supporting the intellectual development of the young Odessa people and promoting of the city of Odessa worldwide through one of the very few sports where Odessa is traditionally strong. As the president of the regional chess federation, Morokhovsky also spoke about local developments of children’s chess, in which the Pivdenny Bank is also deeply involved.

Report from the press conference is by GM Mikhail Golubev (http://www.chesstoday.net/)