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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:
3 June 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 individual European Senior Championships began yesterday in Acqui Terme, Italy, and round 2 is being played today.
The official website for the tournament is now live and so is the chess-results page. There are nine rounds with no rest day and play starts at 3pm local time. The top games in each section can be followed live on Lichess.
The Open 65+ section has 125 competitors including 6 grandmasters. England's Keith Arkell is playing in this age category for the first time and is third seed behind Zurab Sturua and Lubomir Ftacnik (who was held to a draw yesterday).
There are 11 players in the Womn's 65+ championship, an awkward number for a 9-round Swiss and meaning there will be a bye every day. Former women's world champion GM Nona Gaprindashvili lost in the first round to WFM Mira Kierzek of Germawny so this competition is wide open.
There are 89 players in the Open 50+ including 6 grandmasters. The first round saw no surprise results.
There are 12 players in the Women's 50+ Championship where all games in round one were won by the higher-rated player.
Acqui Terme is a venue that will be familiar to many readers from previous evemts held there from 2015 onwards. It has an excellent congress hall, which probably explains why the organisers keep hosting events there. Another senior championship is planned for 2027 but the town does not have a great deal to offer to repeat visitors. Perhaps it is time for FIDE and ECU to give a firm advance indication that future bids for this venue will not be accepted for a few years.
The regulations and other details for the 2026 World Senior Individual Championships, due to be held in Serbia in early November, are now overdue. This information is normally made available in May, if not sooner.
The delay is worrying and inevitably leads to players wondering if there will be a hitch and maybe decide to play elsewhere, such as the more attractive Cap Negret tournament in Spain around the same time.
Delays are almost certainly going to lead to a lower entry from players in western countries, except for those who may think they have a chance of winning something.
FIDE has made its decision about the venue for the 2027 World Senior Team Champonships. This was published first on the German chess federation website. It is still not announced on the FIDE website, though, which is often slow to update seniors information.
We give you here in English the gist of the announcement. It was published a few weks ago by DSB president Ingrid Lauterbach, who will be familiar to many readers as she often represented England in the past.
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 will be from 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+.
Two consequences follow from this decision. The most obvious is that the 14-24 May dates announced by the European Chess Union for their senior team event are much too close and they will have to change, as happened this year.
To make this happen, it is probably important that federations lobby the ECU immediately to take action on this. The ECU needs to find dates in the autumn and if this doesn't suit the intended Italian organisers then they will have to re-open bids.
The second consequence is that the Brazilians, who also proposed to host the event at a scenic venue, will be disappointed. In principle a World Senior Championship should be held soon outside Europe but perhaps it was too ambitious to bid for a team event. Maybe Brazil will consider offering to run the 2028 World Indvidual Senior Championships, in which case we think FIDE should be keen to accept.
The 2026 World Senior Team Championships, played in Durres, an Albanian resort, concluded on 28th April, and you can still read our final report on a separate page.
It will be interesting to see the level of entries for the European Senior Teams Championships (in Crete in late August and early September). The closing date is 26th June, after which a 200 Euro fee applies to any players registered late. So we can expect that many team entries will be submitted soon
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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).
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