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London, 27th June 2024: The Global Chess League, a joint initiative between the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and Tech Mahindra, a leading global provider of technology consulting and digital solutions to enterprises across industries, is set for a highly anticipated second edition in London. Following the success of the first edition, the league aims to unite the world's top chess players in one of the most historic cities.

The 10-day, one-of-a-kind chess league featuring top players will take place at Friends House, located in the heart of central London, from October 3rd to 12th, 2024. Based on the feedback from fans worldwide, London was selected as the venue for this season to connect with the fast-growing fan base and enthusiasm for chess in the European region.

Photo: friendshouse.co.uk

GCL is the world's first and largest official franchise league of its kind, with chess players competing in a unique joint team format. GCL will feature male and female chess champions competing on the same team. The league's joint male-female teams will have the rare distinction of being the only joint team in a professional sports league.

Arkady Dvorkovich, FIDE President, said, After a fantastic response to the inaugural season, we are excited to continue our mission of expanding the reach of chess worldwide and drawing in new experiences for chess fans. Tech Mahindras commitment to usher in a new era in the modern chess ecosystem is commendable, and we are confident that the second edition of the league will provide the right platform and push needed to further elevate the sport.

Through this innovative league, FIDE and Tech Mahindra aim to revolutionize the fan experience of chess through a new format and ecosystem, providing an inclusive platform for fans to support their favourite teams and stars, similar to major global sports leagues. The second edition will feature top players from around the world, including reigning world champions and rising stars, competing in a unique team format that emphasizes strategy, collaboration, and high-stakes play.

Mohit Joshi, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Tech Mahindra, said, Chess and business share key values such as planning, speed, strategy, and risk management. The infusion of technology opens exciting new opportunities, transforming both fields. The Global Chess Leagues second edition creates a unique platform for the global growth of chess.

Building on the success of its first season, the league aims to further broaden the viewership base through live broadcasts, interactive fan experiences, and community engagement activities like soon to be launched Global Chess League Trophy Tour. In the tournament, the players will compete in a unique joint team format consisting of six players, including two top women chess players and a prodigy player per team. Each team will play a total of 10 matches in a double round-robin format, with the winner of each match being decided in a best-of-six board scoring system.

Peeyush Dubey, Chairperson, Global Chess League Board, said, "We will continue to leverage the Global Chess League's innovative format and next-gen technologies to captivate and engage fans worldwide. The second edition is seeing unprecedented excitement from our partners and stakeholders. Together with FIDE, our vision for the league is to bring the best from the chess world."

The second season will see FIDE and Tech Mahindra collaborate to tap into the growing chess fan base, build a larger audience for chess viewing, and engage in exciting fan activities such as the ongoing all-inclusive hackathon. The hackathon engages with participants of all chess skill levels and technical expertise and collates ideas for improving the way chess is experienced, played, and consumed. Participants can propose ideas in various categories, including education, digital innovation, social impact, business, and arts, among others.

About FIDE:

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) is the governing body of the sport of chess, and it regulates all international chess competitions. Constituted as a non-governmental institution, it was recognized by the International Olympic Committee as a Global Sporting Organization in 1999.

FIDE currently has its headquarters in Lausanne, but it was initially founded in 1924 in Paris under the motto Gens una Sumus (Latin for We are one Family). It was one of the very first International Sports Federations, alongside the governing bodies of the sports of Football, Cricket, Swimming, and Auto Racing. It is now one of the largest, encompassing 201 countries as affiliate members in the form of National Chess Federations. Chess is a truly global sport nowadays, with dozens of millions of players on all continents and more than 60 million games on average played every day.

More information: fide.com

Contact: press@fide.com

About Tech Mahindra:

Tech Mahindra (NSE: TECHM) offers technology consulting and digital solutions to global enterprises across industries, enabling transformative scale at unparalleled speed. With 145,000+ professionals across 90+ countries helping 1100+ clients, Tech Mahindra provides a full spectrum of services, including consulting, information technology, enterprise applications, business process services, engineering services, network services, customer experience & design services, AI & analytics, and cloud & infrastructure services. It is the first Indian company in the world to have been awarded the Sustainable Markets Initiatives Terra Carta Seal in recognition of actively leading the charge to create a climate and nature-positive future. Tech Mahindra is part of the Mahindra Group, founded in 1945, one of the largest and most admired multinational federation of companies. For more information on how TechM can partner with you to meet your scale at speed imperatives, please visit techmahindra.com, connect with us on techmahindra.com

For more information on Tech Mahindra, please contact: Abhilasha Gupta, Head - Global Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, Tech Mahindra

Email: Abhilasha.Gupta@TechMahindra.com; media.relations@techmahindra.com

About Tech Mahindra Global Chess League

The Global Chess League is the world's first and largest official franchise league of its kind, with chess players from all over the world competing in a unique joint team format. It is a joint venture between Tech Mahindra, a part of the Mahindra Group, and FIDE. The league will feature male and female chess champions competing in the same team. Playing on the popular Rapid format, the league's joint male-female teams will have the rare distinction of being a unique multiplayer team in the world of professional sports. In addition, the league is a one-of-its-kind live televised chess event offering fans a unique viewing experience. Tech Mahindra and FIDE will explore innovative ways to promote the game through interactive technology-enabled platforms by leveraging next-generation technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, among others.

For more information on Tech Mahindra Global Chess League, please visit: globalchessleague.com

Source

Tech Mahindra: Official site, facebook, twitter,youtube and linkedin

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Tech Mahindra Global Chess League to host its second edition in London - ChessBase India

The second edition of the Global Chess League is all set to be hosted at Friends House, located in the heart of central London. The 10-day tournament will be held from October 3 to 12, 2024.

The Global Chess League Season 1 was hosted in Dubai and turned out to be a great success, with Triveni Continental Kings defeating upGrad Mumba Masters in the final. The final was a thrilling one as the Kings emerged on top after three stages of tie-breaks.

International Chess Federation (FIDE) President Arkady Dvorkovich expressed his happiness with the success of the inaugural edition and the mission to expand the sport across the globe.

The Global Chess League is hosted by FIDE and Tech Mahindra jointly with the aim of pitting the best chess players against each other. They aim to increase the audience of chess with numerous activities in the second edition.

The format of the Global Chess League is unique and engaging with a joint team format consisting of six players, including two top women chess players and a prodigy player per team. Each team will play a total of 10 matches in a double round-robin format, with the winner of each match being decided in a best-of-six board scoring system.

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Global Chess League Season 2 to be hosted in London - Sportskeeda

Kyrylo Shevchenko. Photo: Champion

More than a hundred Ukrainian chess players have changed their sporting citizenship since the start of the full-scale invasion. One of them is Kyrylo Shevchenko, who is among the world's top 100 players.

Source: Tribuna.com media outlet

Details: Of the 110 Ukrainians who have changed the flag under which they perform, 66 are under 18. The other 44 are no more than 23 years old. It is noted that eight chess players have changed their federation to Russian, and only one of them is a child. Also, 14-year-old Tykhon Cherniaiev resumed playing for Ukraine after a short stay in Germany. In total, the Ukrainian Chess Federation has accepted seven players since the beginning of 2022.

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The best Ukrainian chess player who changed his sporting citizenship is Kyrylo Shevchenko, who now plays for Romania and is ranked 51st in the FIDE ranking.

According to Tribuna.com, the international chess organisation received 54,250 for 110 Ukrainians who changed federations, but there is no mention of payments to the Ukrainian Chess Federation. The Ukrainian Chess Federation did not say how much they received for Kyrylo Shevchenko and generally ignored the request regarding the loss of a large number of young athletes.

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Ukraine loses Shevchenko, one of the world's top 60 chess players - Ukrainska Pravda

1. Chess: Magnus Carlsen loses on home ground in Norway to 18-year-old Indian  The Guardian
2. Praggnanandhaa loses to relinquish lead, Ding Liren stunned and Magnus Carlsen rides luck on wild day at Norway Chess  The Indian Express
3. Norway Chess: Naka beats Pragg to grab the lead, Carlsen beats Caruana  Chess News | ChessBase

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Chess: Magnus Carlsen loses on home ground in Norway to 18-year-old Indian - The Guardian

Pawn Sacrifice came out in cinemas a decade ago. In phonetical terms, it sounds more Soho than Chelsea.

But a blue movie, it wasnt. Nor was it a box-office hit. The film, like Chelsea, dramatically underperformed its estimated budget. Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber were in the leading roles and it still flopped. But Enzo Maresca enjoyed the re-telling of Bobby Fischer and Boris Spasskys Match of the Century for the meeting of minds as much as the Cold War intrigue that surrounded a chess match in Reykjavik in 1972.

Towards the end of his playing career, Maresca began studying chess. He found a teacher while in Palermo and must, in time, have learned the finer details of the Sicilian Defence and Fegatello, the delectably named Fried Liver Attack.

It goes without saying that managers at Chelsea have become chopped liver very quickly in the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital era. Maresca is expected to be their sixth in two years if you count a forlorn and fleeting interim like Bruno Saltor, a sequence of events that brings the Italian term for checkmate to mind: Scacco Matto. Matto means bonkers, crazy. But we digress.

Maresca thought learning the rudiments of chess would prepare him for management. Anyone strolling around the library at Coverciano, the Italian Football Federations coaching school on the outskirts of Florence, which is to UEFA Pro Licences what Harvard Business School is to MBAs, can pull down his thesis and read about how the hypermodern Nimzo-Indian defence used by every world chess champion since Jose Raul The Human Chess Machine Capablanca relates to Pep Guardiolas Manchester City sides.

A coach can only benefit from acquiring the mind of a good chess player, Maresca argued. The proof being the development of a number of mental skills that are excellent for the prefrontal cortex.

He listed them as gaining the dexterity to devise tactics and strategy, improve creativity (important for the surprise factor) not to mention the way the game facilitates concentration. The 44-year-old also claimed: Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement when you see something good and trains you to think objectively when you see yourself in danger.

No doubt having paid Garry Kasparov-like attention to how Chelsea have recently been run, Maresca still somehow deduced that a potentially reputation-toppling move away from Leicester could be worth it, irrespective of the experiences of Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino. One can only deduce he thinks hes playing chess, the kind that beats Deep Blue and AI models like AlphaZero, while those guys were playing checkers.

As the opening gambits about Marescas judgement (or lack thereof) in taking the job draw to a close, the parallels he makes with chess are, in all seriousness, well observed.

The chess board is like a football pitch that can be divided into three channels a central one and two external ones, he highlighted. In football as in chess, an inside game can be more interesting as its the quickest and most direct towards goal or the king.

Controlling the middle is fundamental, as Guardiola emphasised to Maresca during his time on his staff, either directly through classic midfielders a la Xavi, Sergio Busquets and Andres Iniesta or indirectly with inverted full-backs a la Philipp Lahm or Rico Lewis acting like knights in chess. Build up through the middle and the pitch opens up like the board, the angles of attack become manifold.

In football terms, the Italian Maresca is influenced by the Spanish juego de posicion.He cites Paul Morphy, the Johan Cruyff to Fischers Guardiola, on the ability to see combinations clearly and how the positional game is, first and foremost, the ability to arrange the pieces in the most effective way.

Then theres the surprise element to chess, which in football terms, again might be considered being on the cusp of taking the Chelsea job as an up-and-coming coach. Maresca instead sees it as the little tweaks from game to game or within a game that can force an opponent to play to their weaknesses and lose confidence and time.

During a world chess championship game in 1991, Viktor Korchnoi took an hour and 20 minutes in making his 13th movement in response to an unexpected variation by his rival Anatoly Karpov, Maresca explained. Karpovs move was not checkmate but the time advantage he gained by surprising his rival was definitely decisive. Korchnoi needed to reorganise and revise his strategy and tactics.

So many Soviets feature in Marescas thesis, one imagines Roman Abramovich and Marina Granovskaia, Chelseas former owner and chief executive respectively, would have been every bit as impressed as Boehly and Behdad Eghbali.

He could become the seventh Italian to bestride the dugout at Stamford Bridge. Two of them won the league, one the Champions League, another the Europa League. All of them, perhaps with the exception of a fellow West Brom alumnus Roberto Di Matteo, were more experienced than Maresca and operated within a club with a different owner who spent big but in a more rational and effective way.

Maresca is expected to arrive on the back of winning the Championship with Leicester after threatening the 100-point barrier. He even came within a game of matching a 104-year record for the most second-division wins (32) in a single season. Some call it Marescaball. His supervisor at Coverciano would probably define it Maresca pawn.

On the face of it, he seems part of the new wave of Italian coaching, which has washed Francesco Farioli up at Ajax and led Juventus to settle on Thiago Motta. He was at the table for that famous meal in Manchester featuring Guardiola, Roberto De Zerbi, Daniele De Rossi and Aleksandar Kolarov not as Peps guest but as one of his assistants. The halo effect that comes from working with the Catalan can dazzle employers. Mikel Artetas success at Arsenal upon leaving Guardiolas staff led Parma to offer Maresca a job when he was the coach of Citys elite development squad.

It did not work out.

Maresca inherited a team disoriented by the enthusiasm of new American owners who spent lavishly (80million!) on unknown youngsters from all over the world (particularly Argentina and Romania) and, unable to put their fingers on what was going wrong, sacked a couple of managers in their first season. The flux was so great even players of Joshua Zirkzees potential didnt shine and Parma surprisingly went down. Maresca was asked to pick up the pieces in Serie B and, more specifically, to turn a couple dozen individuals into a team. Sounds relatively familiar, doesnt it?

Despite having the highest wage bill in the second division, Maresca was fired within a matter of months. He left Parma with 17 points from 13 games, narrowly outside the relegation play-out spot to avoid Serie C.

Upon reflection, Maresca still called it a positive experience. His qualms were a lack of patience (They gave me a three-year contract, and when you do a multi-year contract its because theres a project idea behind it) and unrealistic expectations (No one ever told me that in the first year we should have gone to Serie A, all the more so when 15 or so new players arrive in the summer).

Still, the local media criticised him for using players such as Simon Sohm out of position and, having complained about the disruption of too much transfer activity, he still had the nerve to insist: Parma could have made the play-offs with the three players we identified for the January transfer window.

The scars he suffered at the Ennio Tardini made Maresca think twice about taking the Leicester job last summer. I was a little fearful, he told Gazzetta dello Sport, because it resembled Parma: a big club had been relegated and there was huge pressure to immediately bounce back.

But Leicester set a record pace out of the blocks and finished the first half of the season with 58 points, a testament to Marescas impact but also the sort of spending that led the Premier League to refer the club to an independent commission for an alleged PSR breach and for failing to submit their audited financial accounts to the league for the 2022-23 season, when they were still in the top flight.

Automatic promotion was not all plain sailing. After a 3-1 win against Swansea in January, Maresca was frustrated by the King Powers exasperation with the somnolent side of his tiki-taka style. Probably when you win, win, win at home, and you continue to win, people think its easy. But its not easy. I arrive in this club to play with this idea. The moment there is some doubt about the idea, the day after, I will leave. Its so clear. No doubts.

He did not appreciate the failure to sign Stefano Sensi on loan from Inter Milan after Chelsea recalled Cesare Casadei and Wilfred Ndidi suffered an injury. Leicesters second half of the season yielded 39 points, enough to get over the line in first place but a drop-off that looked like it might spiral after defeats to Middlesbrough, Leeds and Queens Park Rangers in the spring.

Unlike Ipswich Town, who punched well above their weight to return to the Premier League for the first time in 22 years, Leicester met expectations. After all, having 18-goal Jamie Vardy in the Championship felt like a cheat code even with him now firmly in the twilight of his career. Chelsea, meanwhile, evidently share Marescas view that promotion was not as easy as it seemed. That Chelsea and the former midfielder have settled on one another, frankly, remains a surprise.

To return to chess terminology, neither found themselves in Zugzwang: a situation wherein any move can only weaken ones position and carries the risk of checkmate but not moving isnt an option. Chelsea, for instance, didnt need to sack Pochettino. Maresca wasnt obliged to leave Leicester.

Having lost the benefit of the doubt, its only fair to second-guess these grandmasters.

(Top photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)

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Enzo Maresca, Chelsea and the chess thesis that explains his football vision - The Athletic - The New York Times