A French online chess championship will be organized from 2024 and will also be open to non-licensees, the French Federation announced on Tuesday. During the Covid-19 pandemic, French championships had already taken place online, but this is the first time that an official championship organized under these conditions has been announced. Internet chess tournaments, including for the best players, are currently organized by online chess platforms and not by federations.
The French Chess Federation (FFE) had 68,000 licensees in mid-August, a record. But she estimates that casual players are “four million”, a number that has doubled in three years, she says. “We want players who only know chess digitally to be made aware and then be able to go to clubs, compete,” describes AFP Eloi Relange, the president of the FFE.
The games of these 2024 championships will take place according to the “blitz” pace, one of the fastest and most popular paces on the internet. The 2021 world blitz champion, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, told AFP that he intended to participate in the final phase of the competition, which will take place over several stages.
It has been “more than 10 years” since he played in the French championship, he said. He is thus absent from the 2023 edition of the French Championships which is held until August 27 in Alpe d’Huez (Isère) because other international tournaments are taking place at the same time. To organize these future championships, the FFE has partnered with the French platform Immortal Games, launched in 2022.
After several qualifying phases, the final table will be played in a hybrid format: the players will be gathered in the same place but will compete online, under the supervision of official referees. This new format is developing in France, and several events of this type have already taken place in France, organized in particular by Kévin Bordi, the host of the Blitzstream channel, the main chess community.
