Grand Slam – FIDE Candidates Tournament Scheduling Conflict

Aronian, winner of the dutch Tata Steel Tournament, will assist the Bilbao Masters Final in October

Armenian Levon Aronian won the Tata Steel Tournament (Holland) last Sunday, January 29^th, and has been directly classified for the Bilbao Masters Final that will take place from September 24^th to October 13^th.

The Grand Slam Chess Association (GSCA) had a meeting in Wijk aan Zee on Saturday January 28^th. The representatives of four top tournaments (Tata Steel-Wijk aan Zee, Ciudad de Linares, Kings-Bazna and Bilbao (Masters Final) discussed about several matters. The most important ones are the following:

Just as in four previous years, Bilbao will also host the 5^th edition of the Masters Final, from September 24^th to October 13^th, with six players, in a double round-robin. Negotiations are being held with several countries to share the tournament, as it happened very successfully in 2010 with Shanghai and 2011 with Sao Paulo.

Carlsen and Kramnik have been already invited as winners of the Tal Memorial-Moscow 2011 and the London Classics 2011, respectively. The winner of the World Championship Anand-Gelfand will also be invited. The remaining three places will be for the winners of Tata Steel 2012, Linares 2012 and Kings-Bazna 2012. If the same player wins more than one tournament, the highest-ranked second place finisher from one of these tournaments according to the July 2012 list will be awarded a spot. If all the second-place finishers have already earned spots in the 2012 Masters Final by other means, the Organizing Committee will decide who gets the spot by direct invitation.

The 75th edition of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament will be from 11th up to and including 27th of January. The GSCA warmly congratulated the Organizing Committee on this important achievement.

Linares will share the 2012 tournament with a Mexican city, starting most likely at the second half of April. The venue and dates will be concreted soon.

Given that FIDE has not announced yet the dates for the Candidates Tournament, we will send this press release to FIDE today. We expect FIDE will avoid any conflicts with our schedules.

Official website: http://www.bilbaomastersfinal.com/en/

Here comes the problem. The FIDE Candidates tournament is scheduled too close to the Grand Slam. Now, the Grand Slam organizer is asking FIDE to move the dates:

To The President
His Excellency Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
FIDE World Chess Federation

Dear Sir,

Common sense suggests that the FIDE and the organizers of the biggest private tournaments should work together in harmony to avoid the possibility of a clash of dates. This kind of collaboration is something that takes place habitually with the most important professional sports.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in the world of chess. Since the Grand Slam was created five years ago, the associated tournament organizers have approached the FIDE various times with solid proposals and always with a spirit of cooperation in mind. However, our feeling is that the FIDE sees us as enemies, not as allies.

Although you visited us personally during the 2010 Masters Final, what is more typical is that the FIDE does not even reply to our proposals. An example of this was a letter respectfully sent to you by the Secretary General of the Grand Slam three weeks ago after the meeting in Wijk aan Zee. In that letter, apart from referring to the Grand Slam Tournament calendar and the dates for the Final, we explained to you the inconvenience of the dates unofficially announced by you for the Candidates Tournament. These dates will seriously harm various big tournaments in general, but our Masters Final in particular.

So, we appeal again to common sense to ask you to consider the following proposals:

1. As many top class players and organizers have recently expressed, we suggest that the Candidates Tournament be disputed during the first six months of 2013. This period has a lot more tournament-free weeks than the second half of 2013.

2. We propose a meeting of the FIDE with the organizers of the most important tournaments so that, in the best spirit of cooperation, certain dates can be reserved for the top class competitions of the FIDE and for private tournaments. These dates would be the same (or very similar) each year, unless a change of date was applied for with more than one year’s notice and with legitimate reason. All the attendees at the meeting would make a commitment to respect this agreement every year.

With the hope that we can finally reach a reasonable agreement, I look forward very much to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully
Juan Carlos Fernández
Tournament Director Grand Slam Masters Final