Pivdenny Bank Chess Cup

Please find below the information about the Odessa chess event, which begins on this Friday.

BASIC DETAILS

The 4th Pivdenny Bank Chess Cup begins on 30 May 2008 in Odessa, Ukraine, in the National Academy of Law (http://onua.edu.ua/odessa/eng/main.htm). It will be a double round robin, rapid chess tournament with 8 participating grandmasters: Boris Gelfand (2723, ISR) Ruslan Ponomariov (2719, UKR) Anatoly Karpov (2655, RUS) Pavel Tregubov (2629, RUS) Viktor Korchnoi (2598, SUI) Yuri Drozdovskij (2581, UKR) Valery Beim (2523, AUT) Mikhail Golubev (2474, UKR).

SCHEDULE

The time control (for each player) will be 10 minutes for the game plus a 5-second increment after every move. On 30 May, five first rounds will be played; on 31 May there will be another five rounds, and four final rounds will be played on 1 June. On each of these three days, there will be rounds at 13:00 (local time, GMT+2), 14:00, 15:00, etc.

WEB

The official website of the event is http://worldcup.pivdenny.com – we hope to publish the basic information in English (results & standings) there, though the site’s (main) language is Russian. The live transmission of games will be organised by the Shachcom company (http://www.ruschess.com/).

PREVIOUS WINNERS

The winners of the three previous tournaments were:
2005 Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukraine)
2006 Joel Lautier (France)
2007 Vassily Ivanchuk (Ukraine)

ORGANISERS

The main organiser of the tournament is Bank Pivdenny (http://en.bank.com.ua/), which is the largest bank in the southern part of Ukraine.

Pivdenny also organised the 2007 and 2008 ACP World Rapid Chess Cups, which were won by Peter Leko (Hungary) and Teimour Radjabov (Azerbaijan), respectively.

CONTACTS

For additional inquiries, please contact the tournament director, Grandmaster Masha Klinova at:
mklinova@rambler.ru

I (MG) am invited to play as a champion of the Odessa region. I will be fully contactable before and after the tournament.

With best regards
Mikhail Golubev

P.S. The Odessa organisers are collecting articles about their events – I would be grateful for hints, especially about newspaper & magazine articles.