The flurry of official online tournaments in 2023 will go down in history as the richest chess “marathon”.

This year Champions Chess Tour The best players in the world will compete in consecutive tournaments for a share of $2 million to be split among the winners of each.

Each event will have a prize pool of $235,000 and the winners of each tournament will advance to the final stage of the leaderboard, which will take place live in December with a separate prize pool of $500,000.

Chess.com will run six tournaments in total, starting with the Airthings Masters in February.

Carlsen will be there

Hundreds of players, including World Champion Magnus Carlsen and US Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, will compete for first place at the end of the year.

Any player who has already won the title can qualify for his qualification in the playoff matches, which will be attended by 56 chess players.

The matches will be held in a rapid format, and each player will have 15 minutes per game and a three-second bonus for each move.

In the end, “one will survive: the undisputed best online chess player in the world,” said Chess.com CEO Eric Albest. “We look forward to meeting the chess community.”

Online platform Chess.com reports that it now has over 102 million registered users, up 238% from January 2020, and 7.5 million daily active users.

“This has never been a more exciting time for chess lovers,” Chess.com said in a statement, noting that traffic is so high that it can hardly keep up with demand, and its servers sometimes go down during peak hours.

CNN source