Gibraltar Chess Festival

The Gibraltar International Chess Festival is a chess tournament held annually at the Caleta Hotel in Gibraltar. Its eleven days of competition usually run from late January to early February. The inaugural edition, then known as the Gibtelecom Gibraltar Chess Festival, took place in 2003, when fifty-nine competitors took part, of whom 24 held the FIDE Grandmaster title. In 2011 the festival was renamed to the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival when Tradewise Insurance Company Ltd became the new primary sponsor.^[1] Beginning in 2019 Tradewise no longer sponsored the tournament and the name was changed to the Gibraltar International Chess Festival.^[2]

History edit

The main event, the Masters, is open to all, and was voted the best open event in the world by the Association of Chess Professionals in 2011,^[3] 2012,^[4] 2013^[5] and 2014.^[6] Since 2011 an annual Gibraltar Junior International Chess Festival, also held at the Caleta Hotel, has been organised. It lasts five days and takes place in August and it comprises two events: under-16 and under-12.

The Director of the Gibraltar International Chess Festival has been Stuart Conquest since 2011.

In 2012, special stamps were issued by the Gibraltar Post Office to commemorate the tenth edition of the chess festival.^[7]

In 2012 Chinese grandmaster Hou Yifan, at the time ranked number two female chess player in the world, scored 8 points from a possible 10 in the Masters, tying for first place with Nigel Short before losing a play-off match for the first prize.^[8] During this event Hou Yifan defeated Judit Polgár, number one rated female chess player in the world from 1989 to her retirement as a professional player in 2014.^[9]

The highest score achieved in a Gibraltar Masters event has been 9 points from a possible 10, by Vasyl Ivanchuk in 2011, with a performance rating of 2968.

In 2017, Hou Yifan caused controversy by intentionally losing her final game of the tournament in 5 moves against Babu M.R. Lalith to protest the pairings. Hou had grown dissatisfied in recent years with playing in women-only tournaments, and had just dropped out of the Women's World Chess Championship cycle. In Gibraltar, she faced 7 women in her 10 games when the men/women ratio in the tournament was 4:1. The incident was resolved as an extremely unlikely series of computer-generated pairings which nevertheless actually happened, and the result of the protest game stood.

List of winners edit

Since 2007, ties for first place in the Masters have been resolved by a tie-break.

Year	Winner(s)	Leading Female(s)
2003	Vasilios Kotronias Nigel Short	Nóra Medvegy
2004	Nigel Short	Pia Cramling
2005	Levon Aronian Zahar Efimenko Kiril Georgiev Alexei Shirov Emil Sutovsky	Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant Viktorija Čmilytė Pia Cramling Iweta Radziewicz Almira Skripchenko
2006	Kiril Georgiev	Antoaneta Stefanova
2007	Vladimir Akopian	Jovanka Houska
2008	Hikaru Nakamura	Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant
2009	Peter Svidler	Nana Dzagnidze
2010	Michael Adams	Natalia Zhukova
2011	Vasyl Ivanchuk	Nana Dzagnidze
2012	Nigel Short	Hou Yifan^[10]
2013	Nikita Vitiugov	Zhao Xue
2014	Ivan Cheparinov	Mariya Muzychuk
2015	Hikaru Nakamura	Hou Yifan
2016	Hikaru Nakamura	Anna Muzychuk
2017	Hikaru Nakamura	Ju Wenjun
2018	Levon Aronian	Pia Cramling
2019	Vladislav Artemiev	Tan Zhongyi
2020	David Paravyan	Tan Zhongyi