Dear Members,
We'd like to start our Newsletter by congratulating Magnus Carlsen for winning the World Championship Match and praising Sergey Karjakin for putting up a great fight. Kudos to both of these great players for promoting our game!
Now, to the ACP matters.
The end of the year approaches and the work of the ACP intensified as many events are scheduled for the coming festive period.
Firstly, we would like to announce the ACP General Assembly (GA), which will take place from 10 to 23 December. On our GA dedicated web page you will be able to vote for approval of our annual reports and take part in two very important surveys – the ACP Survey and the World Championship Format Survey.
We invite you to use this opportunity to make your opinion heard! Your feedback is essential for ACP!
One of our most important projects, the Veterans Program, implemented in cooperation with FIDE, will continue in 2017. Once again 6 distinguished veterans will receive the award – the list of awardees will be compiled by the end of the year.
The upcoming Individual European Championships, both the open and the female tournaments, to be held in Minsk and Riga respectively, will again have the added incentive for our ACP Premiums. This year the fruitful cooperation with the ECU led to allocating 6000 EUR for the open section and 5000 EUR for the female event, for a total of 11 000 EUR, an increase from this year’s 10 000 EUR. Note that these prizes are separate from the main prizes of the events, meaning that as an ACP Premium you can still get a very good prize even if you don’t get into the main prizes.
We are working to continue our cooperation with several strong European Opens. Following this year's successful partnership with the organizers of the big opens in Tallinn, Tbilisi, Porto Mannu, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Bergamo and London, ACP will continue this program aimed to help those of our members who mostly play in open events.
The ACP Tour determined the wild cards for the upcoming tournaments in London (GM Safarli and WGM Daulyte), Wijk aan Zee (GM Nepomniachtchi and GM Jones) and Gibraltar (GM Kovalenko, GM Ushenina, WGM Batsiashvili and WGM Khademalsharieh). We'd like to thank the organizers of these great events for the cooperation! In addition to that, ACP will provide a special prize (up to 1000 GBP) to the highest-placed ACP Premium member who won't win a regular prize in the Gibraltar Tradewise (which you will remember has been voted as the best open event of 2015).
Wishing you a pleasant festive season,
The ACP Board