Dear Members,
Spring is upon us and chess life is bustling. We would like to inform you of quite a few activities we undertook in the previous period.
We continued our tradition of running the annual Tournament of the Year survey. This time we also have the text in Spanish apart from the usual English and Russian versions! We would like to invite you to take part and tell us which round-robin, official, open and rapid/blitz events you liked best in 2016. As always, we appreciate your feedback because your opinion matters to us and more importantly to the organizers of the events! The deadline for the voting is April 3.
ACP takes it very seriously when its members are being treated unfairly. We already published an open letter concerning the case of GM Zhang Zhong and WGM Li Ruofan at the time when they were unjustly banned by their own Singaporean federation and prevented from taking part in the Zonal tournament. This letter failed to achieve its goal, to make FIDE reverse its action and the damage was done. We have therefore decided to publish another open letter where we announce in no uncertain terms that we will take decisive action against any future wrong-doing.
The ACP wild cards are growing. We are currently working with the organisers of the Llucmajor ACP Open (May 14-21) to provide excellent conditions to our Premium Members. Please check the details here and contact us if you are interested in participating. For the summer tournaments of Porto Mannu (June 3-10), the Najdorf Memorial in Warsaw (July 8-17, possibly the strongest open of the whole summer!) and Bergamo (July 14-16) we also have our places secured. Speaking of wild cards, we can now announce that the wild card for the Poikovsky tournament (April 18-27) goes to Spanish GM David Anton, based on the ACP Tour standings as of March 2. Here we would like to extend our gratitude to the organisers of the Poikovsky tournament for this lasting cooperation.
ACP Premiums will also have the chance to fight for the special ACP prizes in these major official events:
- Individual European Championships. A total of 11.000 EUR are allotted to ACP players: 6000 EUR in the open section (Minsk, May 29– June 10) and 5000 EUR for the Women’s tournament (Riga, April 10–23).
- European- ACP Women Individual Rapid Chess Championship (October 21-22, Novotel Hotel, Monaco). ACP is adding 5000 Euro in prizes reserved to our Premium Members. These prizes are in addition to the event’s regular prize fund. We also provide free accommodation for 5-6 players based on the ACP Tour standings on August 1. You can find all the details here.
Continuing our fruitful cooperation with the tournaments in Wijk aan Zee and Gibraltar we are happy to announce that we will have wild cards in 2018 as well. We are also working on expanding our wild card program and hope to be able to announce new tournaments in the near future, so stay tuned!
ACP Board