Thursday, October 21, 2010

World Youth Championships 2010

The guys at ChessDom may not quite go toe to toe with the heavyweights of chess reporting, but from time to time they do deliver. For instance, they're currently hosting the web presence of the big World Youth Championships tournament in Haldiki. And over night, our friends in CD sent us over a couple of video links including this one which is the arrival of delegations. Yeah very exciting stuff right there.

Now to be honest, I can't remember if this was the one junior tournament that basically accepted anybody who could afford to go. So long as you had the dough, you went. In other words, there was no preliminary tournament, no selections, no nothing. Tournaments like these are basically private affairs. Nothing to be particularly excited about.

Still, I understand that there are Aussies in this event and, given that they'll be facing tough opposition, and it's always nice to have Australians, of course, they at least deserve our prayers.

2 comments:

Garvin said...

Each national federation gets to select one person who gets free accommodation and entry. All the rest have to pay their own way.

Denis Jessop said...

This is the event that began as the FIDE World Cadet Championships and only one player per age group was allowed. Some years ago the title was chenged to the World Youth Championships and then FIDE changed the entry qualifications to one endorsed player and any number of others as Garvin says. As far as Australia is concerned, this is the major junior event in the world. This year the team is very small but I don't know why. In the past selections have been made and competition has been very keen especially for the endorsed place in each group. The team has been very large and we have enjoyed some success, especially with Bobby Cheng last year and Raymond Song some years ago to mention but two. The winner of an age group is the World Champion for that group.

DJ