World’s Elite Battle it out in Five Day Chess Tournament in Leuven
The third edition of the Your Next Move Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz chess tournament will be held in June 2018, with Alexander Grischuk, Anish Giri, Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura, Levon Aronian, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Sergey Karjakin, Viswanathan Anand and Wesley So!
For more information, please contact:
Grand Chess Tour Media
Email: [email protected]
World’s Elite Battle it out in Five Day Chess Tournament in Leuven
Leuven, Belgium – 11 May 2018 – The Your Next Move Grand Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz chess tournament will be returning once again to the historical City Hall of Leuven with play scheduled to take place from Tuesday 12th June until Saturday 16th June 2018.
The best chess players in the world will compete including the 2018 World Chess Champion Challenger Fabiano Caruana (USA) and former world champion Viswanathan Anand (India).
The tournament forms part of the 2018 Grand Chess Tour, a series of global chess events organized in some of the leading cities in the world. The prize money for the 2018 tournament totals US$ 150.000.
The players will compete in both Rapid and Blitz chess during the 5-day event with each player taking part in a total of 27 individual games. Both formats are much faster than the classical chess often seen in traditional chess tournaments. Rapid games typically last less than one hour while Blitz chess is even faster with both players having less than 5 minutes each to complete all their moves.
Chess fans can enjoy the experience of seeing the greatest players competing live in Leuven or they can watch the games on streaming broadcasts, complete with grandmaster commentary. In 2017, more than 1,500 chess fans attended the event in person while the online video broadcasts received more than 700,000 views.
The 2018 event will also see the return of well-known British GM Nigel Short who will again host the live commentary at the tournament venue. He will be joined by GM Maurice Ashley from the USA with the pair also featuring as part of the live broadcast production.
Registration for spectators who wish to attend the tournament in person are now open and anyone interested in visiting the tournament can register for tickets via the official tournament site. Tickets will be allocated on a first come basis.
The tournament venue can accommodate approximately 300 spectators per day and chess fans are encouraged to apply as early as possible to avoid disappointment.
The event will once again feature a travelling exhibition from the World Chess Hall of Fame (WCHOF) in St Louis, USA. The “Art of Chess” exhibition will be installed in the City Hall for the full duration of the tournament and will feature legendary items from chess history from the WCHOF collection.
Another exciting addition to the schedule for this year is an open autograph session which will held on Monday 11th June. This session will be held in conjunction with the drawing of lots which will decide the pairings for the tournament and will start at 5pm local time. Chess players and fans who would like to secure signatures from the best players in the world are welcome to attend this session for which pre-registration will also be required to control numbers.
The Fourth Hotel in Leuven will serve as the official hotel for the tournament and is located within the Grote Markt square and less than 100 meters from the Leuven Town Hall. Fans who require accommodation may contact Joselien Cleyman at [email protected] to secure reservations at the Hotel as required.
Follow us via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Your Next Move
Your Next Move, a non-profit organization and the organizer of this event, promotes chess as an educational tool for children and youngsters in Belgium. By playing chess, children and youngsters learn to analyze and assess difficult situations, to act fast and to act under pressure. Chess enables them to learn to think in a creative and strategic way. Those same qualities will prove to be indispensable in life which increasingly becomes more complex, more global, where evolutions become revolutions and communication channels multiply all the time.
About the Grand Chess Tour (http://grandchesstour.org)
The Grand Chess Tour is a circuit of international events, each demonstrating the highest level of organization for the world’s best players. The Tour was created in partnership between the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (Sinquefield Cup) and Chess Promotions, Ltd. (London Chess Classic). The legendary Garry Kasparov, one of the world’s greatest ambassadors for chess, inspired the Grand Chess Tour and helped solidify the partnership between the organizers.
