 |
 |
Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Dr Tim Harding
Last modified:
15 July 2026
For more information about chess for over-50s, please see our Seniors calendar. Newcomers to 50+ chess should read our Seniors introduction page. We also have pages for specific British Seniors and Irish Seniors news.
The regulations and other details for the 2026 World Senior Individual Championships, due to be held in Serbia in early November, are finally available. See our calendar page or the FIDE news page.
The Open Senior championships of Saxony-Anhalt finished recently in Magdeburg and the results can be seen online. Over 100 players contested the 65+ which ended in a three-way tie on 5.5/7 between Dr. Gerhard Köhler (former German 65+ champion), Tom Farrand from England (placed second on tiebreak) and Dr. Peter Babrikowski. There was also a 50+ tournament with 38 competitors, won by Peter Oppitz and Detlef Schötzig on 5/7.
The list of teams and players entered for the European Senior Teams Championships was recently released on chess-results. These tournaments will be played in Hersonissos, Crete, over nine rounds in Crete during late August and early September.
Fourteen teams (including a English Women's team) have entered the 50+ tournament and 18 teams are in the 65+ section. As yet the list is not sorted by starting rank or age category.
The first teams of England and Italy (all titled players) will almost certainly contest the top positions on the 50+ podium with teams from Slovakia and the Netherlands also having a rating average above 2200.
In the 65+, England-1, Slovenia and Italy are the highest ranked teams. Of the total of 32 teams entered, eight are from England, four from Israel (incluidng two club teams) and three from Sweden. Ireland have a team in each section but Scotland and Wales are not going.
Meanwhile the European Chess Union has announced that next year's European Senior Team Championships will be played at Acqui Terme in northern Italy, at the same venue where last month's European Senior individual championships (and where several other championships in the past eleven years) were held.
We believe that FIDE has over-used this venue as senior players would like more variety. We have played twice in Acqui Terme and will certainly never go there again. There is a good congress hall but there is not much to do in the town and some of the hotels are not great.
More importantly, there is a serious problem about the announced dates which are now even closer to those for the World Senior Team Championships than the originally announced dates. See more about this lower down on this page.
Full details of all four recent European senior champonship tournaments can still be found on the chess-results page. GM Zurab Sturua (Georgia) won the European Open 65+ title with 7.5/9. The 75+ first prize (in the 65+ tournament) went to IM Nils-Gustaf Renman (Sweden) who was in the group on six and a half points that included England's GM Keith Arkell who was placed ninth.
WIM Elena Krasenkowa (Poland) is the new Women's 65+ champion, scoring 7/9 in a field of 11 players. GM Jean-Marc Degraeve (France) won the Open 50+ with 7/9. There was a five-way tie on six and a half points, decided on tiebreak in favour of GM Danny Gormally (England) who won silver and GM Martin Mrva (Slovakia) who took bronze.
The Women's 50+ championship was won by IM Silvia Alexieva (France) with an impressive 8/9; there were 12 competitors.
We were told some time ago that FIDE has made its decision that the 2027 World Senior Team Champonships will be Magdeburg just after Easter. This was published a long time ago on the German chess federation website. Yet this is still not announced on the FIDE website, which is often slow to update seniors information.
If the dates in their press release are correct (and the date-span seems slightly too long), then the ECU will have to switch their event. Many readers will recall that this clash also occurred in 2026. Isthere no coordination between ECU and FIDE about senior events? It seems not.
We give you here in English the gist of the announcement. It was published by DSB president Ingrid Lauterbach so we would be surprised if it is not true. Ingrid will be familiar to many readers as she often represented England in the past but changed her affiliation to her native country in recent years.
Following an inspection in February, the FIDE Council has accepted the bid submitted by the German federation and the Saxony-Anhalt Chess Association to host this major annual event at the Maritim Hotel in the historic eastern German city of Magdeburg. Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the German federation which last hosted these championships in 2018.
The dates of this nine-round event have been announced as 31st March to the 11th of April 2027. So it will start just after Easter, which falls next year on Sunday 28th March. As usual we can expect that there will be separate 50+ and 65+ tournaments for teams of four (with an optional reserve) and with separate awards for the best all-female teams.
Teams can represent nations, cities, regions, clubs or just be groups of friends so long as all players on a team are from the same federation.
The Germans have a budget of half a million Euros and are expecting that as many as 150 teams may enter. There are sure to be many German regional and club teams because senior chess is so popular in that country. So far there have never been enough women's teams to have separate female tournaments but perhaps that may be different next year, a least in the 50+.
Meanwhile the European Chess Union, which had announced dates in May for their own senior team event, have now brought their dates forward so that their event would start less than two weeks after the world team championships end.
Clearly this is totally unacceptable and if the Magdeburg dates are correct then the ECU needs to switch its event to the autuumn, and preferably not in Acqui Terme.
The only bid listed to host the 2027 World Senior individual championships is from Italy (1-17 October) proposing Orosei on the east coast of Sardinia as the venue. The ECU calendar says that its 2027 European individual senior championships are scheduled for Chotowa in southern Poland at unspecified dates in July. (The nearest international airport is Katowice, about 36km).
Back to our Seniors introduction page