The 16th International Chess Festival in honor of Miguel Najdorf is taking place in the Warsaw from 8-16 July, 2016. Games start daily at 17:00 CET and will be live with triple engine analysis by ChessArena.com
The tournament format in the Open A-B-C is Swiss system in 9 rounds with time control 90 min. for 40 moves + 30 min. for the rest of the game, with an increment of 30 seconds per move starting from move 1.
The Festival is sponsored by MetLife and organized by Kazimierz Sosnkowski Chess Foundation, in co-operation with the Polish Chess Federation and ACP.
List of top rated participants
About Miguel Najdorf
Miguel Najdorf (15 April 1910 – 4 July 1997) was a Polish-Argentine chess grandmaster, famous for his Najdorf Variation in the Sicilian defense.
Najdorf’s string of successes from 1939 to 1947 had raised him into the ranks of the world’s top players. According to Chessmetrics, he was ranked second in the world from mid 1947 to mid 1949. Despite his strong results, Najdorf was not invited to the 1948 World Championship tournament as a replacement for Reuben Fine.
Although not a full-time chess professional (for many years he worked in the insurance business), he was one of the world’s leading chess players in the 1950s and 1960s and he excelled in playing blindfold chess: he broke the world record twice, by playing blindfold 40 games in Rosario, 1943, and 45 in São Paulo, 1947, becoming the world blindfold chess champion. In 1950, FIDE made him one of the inaugural International Grandmasters. In the same year he played at Budapest in the Candidates Tournament to select a challenger for the world chess championship, and finished fifth. Three years later, in the Zürich Candidates Tournament in 1953, he finished sixth, and never succeeded in qualifying for the Candidates again. The closest he would come in the remainder of his career was in the following cycle, when he narrowly failed to qualify from the 1955 Interzonal, held at Gothenburg, Sweden.
The Najdorf Variation in the Sicilian Defense, one of the most popular openings in modern chess, is named after him. Najdorf also made contributions to the theory and praxis of other openings such as the King’s Indian Defense.
