Russian Chess Championship Superfinal to Kick off in Chita
The Superfinals of the 68th Men’s Russian Chess Championship and the 65th Women’s Russian Chess Championship will take place between 8 and 21 August in the city of Chita. The competition will be held by the Russian Chess Federation, the Elena and Gennady Timchenko Charitable Foundation and the Zabaykalsky Krai Chess Federation, with support from the government of the Zabaykalsky Krai. The competition partners will be Norilsk Nickel and the Baikalsk Mining Company.
The 2015 Superfinal will determine Russia’s strongest chess player among the country’s reigning champion Igor Lysyj (the Sverdlovsk Region), Dmitry Jakovenko (the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District ― Yugra), Denis Khismatullin (the Republic of Bashkortostan), Sergey Karjakin (Moscow), Evgeny Tomashevsky (the Saratov Region), Peter Svidler, Nikita Vitiugov (both from St. Petersburg), Vladislav Artemiev (the Omsk Region), Alexander Motylev (Moscow), Ivan Bukavshin (the Samara Region), Ildar Khairullin (St. Petersburg), and Daniil Dubov (Moscow).
The women’s tournament will be a showdown between the reigning champion Valentina Gunina (Moscow), Alexandra Goriachkina (the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District), Kateryna Lagno, Alexandra Kosteniuk (both from Moscow), Natalija Pogonina (the Saratov Region), Olga Girya (the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District ― Yugra), Ekaterina Kovalevskaya (Moscow), Marina Guseva (the Stavropol Region), Alina Kashlinskaya, Anastasia Savina (both from Moscow), Anastasia Bodnaruk (St. Petersburg), and Evgenija Ovod (the Leningrad Region).
The tournaments’ total prize fund is 8 million rubles.
A pre-start press conference, to be attended by the organizers and the champions of Russia, will take place at the Monblan hotel on 8 August, at 18:30 local time.
The Superfinal’s grand opening will be held on the same day, and will start at 20:00 at the concert hall of the Zabaykalsky Krai Philharmonia. The drawing procedure will be part of the ceremony.
The games will be played at the Megapolis-Sport Youth Palace. The rounds will begin at 15:00 (10:00 Moscow time), while the last round will start at 13:00 (08:00 Moscow time).
The playing days are 9-14 and 16-21 August. A day off will be provided on 15 August.
On that day, a simultaneous exhibition will be held in Chita. Fifty young chess players from the Zabaykalsky Krai will cross swords with famous grandmasters: Evgeniy Najer, Sergei Rublevsky, and Evgenij Miroshnichenko.
A press conference will be arranged on 9 August at 15:30 at the Megapolis-Sport Youth Palace, where the Russian Chess Federation, Elena and Gennady Timchenko Charitable Foundation, and and the Zabaykalsky Krai Chess Federation will present the Chess in Schools project, a new one for the region.
As has become a tradition at these tournaments, the organizers are preparing an extensive additional program for chess lovers of any age.
The Russian Chess Federation’s official website will have online and video broadcasting, and well-known grandmasters will commentate the games both in Russian and in English.
The tournament’s official website: http://ruchess.ru/
For more information, please contact: Eteri Kublashvili, +7-905-791-76-51, e-mail: ekublashvili@gmail.com; Elena Fedorova, 8-964-470-06-06, e-mail: epfedorova@gmail.com.
Information for the media:
The region is the eastern economic, geopolitical, and historical outpost of Russia. Its southern and south-eastern border is also the Russian Federation’s border with Mongolia (863 km) and China (1095 km).
An important milestone in the Zabaykalsky Krai’s history was the exile of the Decemberists to this place starting from 1826, which is when the first data about the development of chess in the region dates from.
The region is a multiethnic land shared by Russians, Buryats, Ukrainians, Tatars, Byelorussians, Evenki, and other peoples.
The Zabaykalsky Krai is among Russia’s oldest mining regions and boasts vast mineral and commodity resources. It is among the leading Russian regions in terms of uranium, silver, copper, fluorite, tantalum, titanium, lead, gold, tin, and coal reserves. It also features many mineral deposits, including the Udokan copper deposit, the largest in Russia and one of the largest in the world.
The region also has a considerable tourism potential: the flora here is comparable to that of Southern Crimea, Moldova, Transcaucasia and the Amur basin. The region has plenty of mineral water sources (about 300, with a different chemical composition and temperature, and most of them have medicinal properties) and thermal sources, competing with the Carpathians, Southern Crimea, Caucasus, and the Black and Baltic Sea coasts.
There is also a unique place near Chita ― the Pallas mountain (1236 m), which is the starting point for as many as three great rivers: the Amur, the Lena, and the Yenisei.
Official website: www.забайкальскийкрай.рф