The FTX Crypto Cup Chess Tournament, which starts this weekend, looks like a very interesting event for two reasons. One of them is connected with the prize at stake: the prize fund of the online championship will amount to $ 320,000, a third of which is for the first time expressed in digital currency. The second – with the composition of the participants. Within the framework of this tournament, the reigning world chess champion Magnus Carlsen and the winner of the Candidate tournament Ian Nepomniachtchi will meet for the first time after the Russian won the right to participate in the match for the chess crown.
The FTX Crypto Cup, which kicks off this Sunday and is the next leg of Magnus Carlsen’s big online tour, promises to be an extremely exciting event. What is at stake here is a reward that is by no means traditional for chess competitions. The prize fund of the competition will be $ 320,000, of which $ 100,000 is a bonus that will be paid to chess players in bitcoins from one of the leading cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges FTX. This means that fans, ChessBase notes, “will be able to track the size of the prize pool throughout the tournament,” which will change in line with bitcoin’s exchange rate.
This tournament is certainly interesting in terms of its composition. The fact is that the participants in the match for the title of the World Championship, which will be held from November 24 to December 16, will converge on FTX Crypto. The current title holder Magnus Carlsen will play with Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi, who won the Candidate Tournament in Yekaterinburg ahead of schedule at the end of April.
Norwegian chess player Magnus Carlsen
Photo: Alexey Smagin, Kommersant
While the world champion is still seen as the top favorite in all the competitions he competes in, the outcome of this confrontation is not all that clear.
Magnus Carlsen seems to have just emerged from a protracted crisis that began in October last year.
For six months the Norwegian grandmaster played at a level far from his usual level. Until May, he did not win the tournaments of the series initiated by him. At the first stage of the Skilling Open, Carlsen lost to American Wesley So. In the second, Airthings, as well as in the third, Magnus Carlsen Invitational, the Norwegian did not even get a place in the final. It didn’t work out for Carlsen at the fourth stage – Opera Euro Rapid: losing to the same Co in the final. And the main failure of the world champion happened at the super tournament in Wijk aan Zee, where he showed a terrible result – the final sixth place. Now it looks like Carlsen is back on track, as evidenced by his recent win at the New In Chess Classic.
However, Ian Nepomniachtchi also added a lot.
At the Candidate Tournament, he made a single misfire when, last year, before stopping him after the first round, he lost a game to Frenchman Maxime Vachier-Lagrave.
In others, he was usually extremely convincing.
Several more well-established grandmasters will compete for the cryptocurrency – the Americans Fabiano Caruana, Hikaru Nakamura and Wesley So, the Chinese Ding Liren, the Frenchman Maxim Vachier-Lagrave, the Russians Daniil Dubov and Peter Svidler, as well as the current representative of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) child prodigy Alireza Firouja.
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