The Airthings Masters, the first event on the $1.6 million Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, kicks off Saturday 19th February with World Champion Magnus Carlsen topping a field full of ambitious young players. Fighting chess will be rewarded in 2022, both with cash for wins and a Season Bonus Fund of up to $200,000. David Smerdon’s Fighting Chess Index will be used to award prizes, while there are also prizes for performing above expectations or playing brilliant games. New Tour ratings are being introduced to chart how players perform online.
The 2022 Meltwater Champions Chess Tour is about to begin, with the action kicking off at 18:00 CET on Saturday 19th February right here on chess24. Tania Sachdev and Peter Leko are teaming up again, while the Oslo studio broadcast with Kaja Snare, Jovanka Houska and David Howell promises to be bigger and better than ever. They’ll all be streaming live from around 17:45.
The tournament begins with the 4-day, 15-round Prelims, where the 16 players face each other once at rapid (15 min + 10 sec/move) chess and only the Top 8 players advance to the knockout. The pairings are out.
The biggest twist this year is that there are 3 points for a win, but also $750 for the winner of each game, so that every game matters, even if qualification for the knockout has already been decided.
If it’s a draw each player gets $250, so $500 is paid out, but what happens to the extra $250? It goes forward to the Season Bonus Prize Fund!
That starts at $20k, and will grow with every draw in the Prelims. There are 15 x 8 = 120 games in each Regular tournament, so that in 6 such tournaments we have 720 games. If they’re all drawn (a pandemic no-one would wish on the world!) we’d have 720 * $250 = $180,000, which added to the $20,000 makes a potential bonus of $200,000.
That money will be paid out to the players at the end of the season, with a series of prizes that reward:
This is inspired by Australian Grandmaster and Economist David Smerdon, who came up with a way to measure the combativeness of chess players based, for instance, on the number of quick draws they agree. It provoked instant controversy and discussion, with a ranking of the Top 50 for 2015-2020 listing Vladimir Kramnik as no. 1 and Teimour Radjabov as no. 50.
David will now be working together with the Tour to showcase the Fighting Chess Index of the players and to award prizes at the end of the season. There will be 3 prizes: to the player with the best fighting chess rating after playing 5 or more tournaments, to the player with the best rating after 3 or more, and finally after 1 or more. No player can win more than one prize.
The Tour has shown that ratings don’t lie and the usual suspects such as Magnus Carlsen, Wesley So and Anish Giri are also the players to beat in online rapid chess. Qualifying for the knockouts is hard, and winning them even harder.
The second category of season prizes, however, will reward something else — the amount that players out-perform their expected scores based on their classical ratings before they compete in the Tour.
That means there’s a chance even for players who don’t challenge for the top spots to win prizes based on how far they exceed expectations. Of course there’s a good chance that hungry and likely underrated youngsters could feature highly in this category.
Can Praggnanandhaa, for instance, outperform his 2612 rating?
Once again there are prizes for the player who exceeds expectations most after playing 5+, 3+ or 1+ events.
Tour commentators will nominate their favourite game from each tournament, and at the end of the season fans will get to vote among the selected games for the best game prizes. Once again, it’s something else to play for even if a particular game might not change the standings significantly!
As well as the prizes we’re also going to up the game when it comes to statistics for the 2022 Tour. We’ve brought in Tai Pruce-Zimmerman, best known in the chess world for his Chess by the Numbers website, to crunch the numbers.
He’ll be handling the performance ratings for the players, but also the introduction of a new Tour rating system, that will start off by using players’ classical ratings but then be updated immediately after each game depending on the results. It’s going to follow roughly the same Elo rating system used by FIDE, but with some twists — for instance, colour will be taken into consideration, with a draw between two equally rated players seeing a small rating gain for the player with Black and a loss for the player with White.
We’ll then be able to follow how the players actually perform across the tour and make more accurate predictions for future events.
The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour has pioneered bringing genuine commercial sponsorship into chess, with a lot of familiar names returning in 2022.
The Airthings Masters of course sees the return of the Tour’s Official Air Quality Partner Airthings…
…but more collaborations have also been announced. Animoca Brands plan to bring chess to the metaverse…
…while Secretlab are tackling a more down-to-earth problem — providing the best possible chairs as the players battle it out for hours in front of their computer screens.
The Tour is all about the players, however, and the coverage starts at 11:45 ET | 17:45 CET | 22:15 IST on Saturday 19th February. Watch the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour right here on chess24!
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