The Gibraltar International Chess Festival 2019 started on January, 22 at Hotel Caleta in Gibraltar and will continue until January 31. 250 players take part in the Masters tournament, including fourteen players, who have an Elo rating over 2700. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, Levon Aronian, Wesley So, Yu Yangyi and Hikaru Nakamura are the top seeds who will fight for the first prize of £25,000. Women's World Champion Ju Wenjun is the top female player in the field. Other top female players, including Anna and Mariya Muzychuk, Kateryna Lagno, Humpy Koneru, Aleksandra Goryachkina, Pia Cramling are also the candidates for the women`s prize of GBP £15,000.



As an open tournament, the Gibraltar Masters also attracts top chess prodigies from all over the world, eager to take their chances with the Swiss pairing system and cross swords with an elite player. Some of these young stars have established their celebrity before becoming teenagers and youth is well to the fore in the 2019 line-up. One such is Dommaraju Gukesh of India, aged 12, who, just days before the tournament, secured his final grandmaster norm, becoming the second youngest to achieve the title in chess history after Sergey Karjakin. There are plenty of others with very high ratings in their mid-teens, including Lance Henderson de la Fuente of Spain, who scored a grandmaster norm last year, and Prithu Gupta of India, who also played impressively at last year’s event. And no doubt there will be other youngsters, as yet unknown in this part of the world, who will use the opportunity to show what they can do on the big stage which the Gibraltar Masters represents. That is all part of the excitement of the tournament.



Official website: www.gibchess.com

You can find video interviews and other source material from the days rounds at YouTube Channel.