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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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© Dr Tim Harding
Last modified:
5 December 2023
For more information about chess for over-50s, please see our Seniors calendar and our Seniors introduction page.
After a short holidfay from updating this website, since not much has been happening, our calendar has been updated with several more tournaments to be held in 2024.
We heard excellent reports of the Cap Negret Seniors, held last month at Altea in Spain. Brian Hewson says the hotel was superb with excellent choice of food. GM Keith Arkell won the 50+ section and England's Mark Page also won some cash.
Brian says that if they hold this event again next year, they should certainly publicise it better. Apparently the nearest airport is Alicante.
The European Chess Union last month published the regulations and invitation document for the 2024 European Senior Team Championships to be held next May. See our calendar for links.
Note that although the venue is in Slovenia, the nearest airport is Zagreb (in Croatia) and the organisers are offering transfers from there at reasonable cost from Zagreb airport. Lovers of the writer James Joyce may like to explore travel options via Trieste instead.
Krakow, Poland, will be the venue for the 2024 World Senior Team Championships in July which we expect to be more popular than the one in Slovenia. As yet there are no official invitation documents but we would expect details to be released during the New Year senior congress in Krakow, if not sooner. See the calendar for details of that.
The World Individual Senior Championships were played in Sicily from late October to early November. See our finalised special report for details. You can also still read our report on the 2023 World Senior Team Championships which was played earlier this autumn at Struga in North Macedonia.
We still await confirmation of FIDE's provisional decision about the 2024 World Senior Individual Championships, which are usually played in late autumn. These tournaments may be played in Romania but there are no dates yet.
Some readers may have encountered the English Fide Master Robin Moss who played in the 2019 Irish 65+ Championship and actually won first prize in the 2020 event (though he could not claim the title as he wasn't Irish). Some opponents were convinced he was cheating using the Igors Rausis method due to his long absences away from the board during their games. Can we have our FIDE ratings points back now please?
Our suspicions about Moss's character have now been confirmed. Following his conviction in a criminal trial in England last month, there is now a European arrest warrant out for him. Moss has been convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten years jail in absentia. He had jumped bail and did not appear for his trial in Nottingham. The severity of the sentence also reflected the fact that he had a previous conviction.
It is believed that Moss has taken refuge in Poland because he recently changed his FIDE registration to that country. We have not heard that he has been apprehended so perhaps he has moved on to another country. He is probably avoiding chess events. Will any reader who knows where he is please contact Interpol?
The Spanish Senior Championships (50+ and 65+) were played during October in Roquetas. The 269 available games that were broadcast live from the two tournaments are downloadable here in PGN.
In the 65+ tournament, GM Jose Luis Fernandez Garcia emerged victorious with 7.5/9; he won his first five games but lost in round 6 to lower-rated Jose Ponce Navalon. Daniel Elguezabal Varela was second on 7/9. The 50+ Championship ended in a tie on 6.5/9 between IM Jose Candela Perez and Antonio Cantero Navarro.
GM Yuri Balashov won the 65+ section of the Russian senior championships (Higher League), which was also played in October; he scored 7/9. There was a tie on 6/9 in the Women's 65+, WGM Galina Strutinskaya finishing ahead of untitled Tatyana Ivanovna on tiebreak. She went on to win the Women's 65+ World Seniors but Balashov lost two games in the World event.
The Amateur Chess Organisation (ACO) 50+ "world senior championships" was played during October in Crete. As usual, there were several sections arranged by rating bands. The top section was a triple round robin for four players won by Fred Berend of Luxemborg with 6/5/9. ACO also has announced the dates for its 2024 65+ tournaments, which it calls the "Super Seniors" - but not as yet its 50+ event for the next year. More details may become available in due course on the organisers' website.
ACO is a German-based commercial company. Note that their tournaments are NOT rated by FIDE although they use FIDE (or national) ratings to determine which tournament entrants compete in. The "titles" they award are not recognised by anyone except themselves. ACO events are essentially a holiday but they are popular with regular visitors. FIDE need to recognise that they are in competition with ACO for the large minority (or is it small majority?) of senior players who want a good holiday and not just a chess tournament.
The 10-man round-robin United States Senior Championship, held at Saint-Louis from 16-24 July, was won by GM Melikset Khachiyan with a round to spare while GM Alex Shabalov finished second.
Khachiyan (who did not play on the winning American team in Struga) won $20,000 and the players who finished in the tie for 8th-10th each won $3333. This should be compared with the 1,500 Euro first prize in the two FIDE World Senior championships.
It remains disappointing to us that the Americans only have a 50+ championship, or if they do hold a 65+ event it is of lower prestige and held elsewhere. We are also not sure how they decide who qualifies for the lucrative Senior event; is it done on rating?
Maybe these are matters for the US Chess Federation and sponsor Rex Sinquefield to consider for 2024.
We have removed old results from this page now and some of what you see above will also be deleted before the end of 2023.
In March FIDE issued new regulations concerning the World Senior Championships. These can be found in section D/04/03 of the FIDE Handbook. One detail we noted is that the championship could be reduced from 11 rounds to 9 rounds although that is not happening this year, fortunately. Other changes concern offering choices of hotels and meal plans, evidently in response to criticisms of the 2022 arrangements in Assisi.
The new regulations also state that "the organizer of the competition should ensure representation of all continents and at least 20 players in each of the categories." There was criticism last year of FIDE's late decision not to hold separate tournaments for female players, which was apparently because not all continents would have been represented. So this year instead they combined the 50+ and 65+ women's championships in one tournament.
If you have Seniors chess news you would like posted here, or announcements of future events, please email Tim Harding.
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