Total World Chess Championship Tour muscles its way into global calendar

The chess calendar is crowded. Top players rarely get to take a breather these days with so many big events, across formats, taking place across the globe.

And it is going to get even more crowded with the newly launched Total World Chess Championship Tour. Its pilot will be held at Budapest from November 10 to 21. Lined up for the event are many of the biggest names in chess, headlined by World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen.

There are three Indians in the fray — Arjun Erigaisi and the Chennai siblings R. Praggnanandhaa and R. Vaishali. Arjun is one of the eight top 10 players that will compete in Budapest.

The presence of men like Fabiano Caruanan (World No. 2), Vincent Keymer (No. 5) and Wesley So (No. 6) ensures it would be a stiffly contested event, which will feature 24 players in all.

The first full tour will begin next year with four legs to be played in cities across the world. Conceived by Norway Chess, with blessings from the world chess governing body FIDE, the new tour combines different formats of chess — classical, rapid and blitz.

There are, of course, separate World championships for all those categories, and the classical format Total World Chess Championship is not quite classical in fact: the time control is 45 minutes with an increment of 30 seconds per move.

That may look more rapid than classical, for which the time control is usually 90 minutes for the first 40 moves and then 30 minutes for the rest of the game with increment.

Total Chess, to be fair, isn’t calling its format classical, but fast classical. That makes sense. For, classical chess needs to retain its prime place.

It is still the World champions in classical chess — be it Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov or Viswanathan Anand — that the world will always remember vividly.

The Total Chess Championship Tour, though, is a welcome addition to the mind sport. The more the merrier.