Dear Members,
We hope you had a pleasant festive season, even though probably many of you spent the holidays playing chess! And that is good, for playing and enjoying chess is what unites us all.
On the other hand, the New Year also marks the time for renewing your ACP membership. Whether by bank transfer or PayPal (using our address paypal@chessprofessionals.org) you can find all the information on our Registration webpage here.
There are plenty of reasons to keep on staying with the ACP family or joining anew (apart from the obvious reason of not losing ACP Tour points by renewing before 1 March). The recent ACP Poll showed that ACP activities are well-appreciated not only among our members, but also among the general public
For example, our wild cards are offering more and more opportunities to play top-notch events. The ongoing Tata Steel in Wijk aan Zee sees our Premiums Ian Nepomniachtchi (Masters), Gawain Jones and Ilya Smirin (Challengers) while the upcoming tournament in Gibraltar will see Grandmasters Igor Kovalenko, Anna Ushenina, Nino Batsiashvili and Sarasadat Khademalsharieh fight it out at one of the best open tournaments in the world. Another important success of our wild card program is the inclusion of the ACP qualifier in the FIDE Grand Prix circuit. Based on the standings of the ACP Tour, Evgeny Tomashevsky gets the coveted spot and will have the chance to qualify for the Candidates Tournament from the Grand Prix events. We have one more wild card for the traditional Poikovsky tournament, which we will determine based on the standings of the ACP Tour on 3 March. Even more wild cards are coming in from other open tournaments in the world, so stay tuned! We would also like to thank all our partners for the cooperation.
Our World Championship Format Poll drew a lot of attention and you can see the complete results following this link. One of the most surprising results of the poll is that a lot of people are in favour of the tie-breaks being played before the classical part of the match!
The cooperation with FIDE on the Veterans Program continues and we are pleased to announce that this year another 6 distinguished veterans will receive this award. We will publish their names in our next newsletter.
As it has become usual in the previous years, this year ACP again managed to include special prizes for its Premium members in the upcoming Individual European Championships, both for the open and the women tournament. The fruitful cooperation with ECU will see additional 6000 EUR allocated for the open section and 5000 EUR for the women tournament. This is an increase from last year when we had 10 000 EUR in total ACP prizes.
Last but not least, the fruitful cooperation with ECU will result in the joint European – ACP Women's Rapid&Blitz Championship to be staged in Monaco in October. ACP contributes a significant part of the prize fund for the event and we invite all our members to join the tournament – regulations to be published soon.
Wishing you a good start of the year,
The ACP Board
