A powerful cast of grizzled veterans and title-hungry young players will vie for the championship as the 24th edition of the Dubai Open Chess Tournament which opens Saturday at the Dubai Chess and Culture Club.
The 2019 World Cup champion and three-time European Team Chess Championship winner Grandmaster (GM) Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan will lead more than 200 players from 28 countries who will compete in the event over nine grueling days.
Also seeing action is GM Jahongir Vakhidov, an Olympiad hero from Uzbekistan who helped propel his country to the top of the podium with a gold-medal performance on fourth board in the 2022 World Chess Olympiad in Chennai.
A pair of 18-year-old grandmasters from India, second-seed GM Raunak Sadhwani and third-seed Leon Luke Mendonca, are among a slew of young talents expected to give stiff competition to the battle-hardened professionals.
Sadhwani is one of the youngest players in history to become a grandmaster, while Mendonca is coming off a morale-boosting championship finish in the Challengers’ section of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament in January.
More than 80 other players who hold international titles will also be competing in the tournament, which offers $52,000 in cash prizes to the winners.
Najeeb Mohammed Saleh, vice chairman of the Dubai Chess and Culture Club, said the elite cast of participants reaffirms the tournament’s status as one of the most prestigious events in the international chess calendar, having attracted the biggest names in chess, including world number one Magnus Carlsen, who officially became a grandmaster at the event.
The tournament will feature two categories with Radjabov as the highest-rated player in Category A with an Elo rating of 2723. Fifteen-year-old Egyptian prodigy International Master (IM) Kevin George Micheal (2258) is the top-seed in Category B, which is open to players with an Elo rating below 2300.
The tournament introduced a second category last year and tournament director Othman Musa Abdullah said the club decided to maintain both categories this year to ensure a high level of competition.
The players will compete over nine rounds, with each player having 90 minutes, plus a 30-second increment added after each move, to complete a game. The games will start from 5pm every day. Emirati International Arbiter (IA) Mahdi Abdul Rahim will lead the tournament’s officiating team.