World chess master Garry Kasparov will travel to Bucharest to inaugurate the Superbet Chess Classic Romania 2021 chess tournament next month, organizers said on Thursday.
The first stage of the Grand Chess Tour 2021 circuit will start on June 4 in Bucharest and end on June 14.
Chess grandmaster
Garry Kasporov, a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Chess Champion considered the best chess player of all time and onetime world champion will open the event, a press release said Friday.
The event is designed to send a message of confidence to chess lovers and young people after the pandemic.
„We want to encourage the younger generation to discover chess as a sport of the mind and as a tool for education and self-education to cope with the most difficult moments, “ they may face in their lives, a statement said.
Chess competition
The chess competition is the first of the five stages of the world circuit founded by Garry Kasparov, Grand Chess Tour ™ 2021.
It is organized by the Romanian Chess Federation, the Superbet Foundation and the Grand Chess Tour. Ten internationally recognized chess players will participate, including the best chess player in Romania/
Classic chess
The registered chess players are: Fabiano Caruana; Levon Aronian; Anish Giri; Alexander Grischuk; Wesley So; Shakhriyar Mamedyarov; Teimour Radjabov; Maxime Vachier-Lagrave; Richard Rapport, Constantin Lupulescu.
The contest will be classic chess, unlike the 2019 edition hosted by Romania, which was fast chess and flash.
Chess players will play in a tournament system and the winner will be decided based on the accumulated score. Prizes amount to 350,000 Euros.
Strategic thinking
Chess grand-master Garry Kasparov visited Romania in 2017 November where he spoke at Bucharest conference on strategic thinking.
Kasparov, who was born in Azerbaijan in the former Soviet Union, was the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985, at the age of 22.
He was the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He defended his title five times, including in a legendary series of matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov.
Unbroken record
Kasparov broke Bobby Fischer’s rating record in 1990 and his own peak rating record remained unbroken until 2013.
He was one of the first prominent Soviets to call for democratic and market reforms and was an early supporter of Boris Yeltsin in his push to break up the Soviet Union.
He retired from professional chess in 2005 and in 2012 was named was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel.
