The youngest players are more interested in chess composition
Two weeks after the 1st FIDE & WFCC World Youth Chess Solving Championships in Brazil (U14, U16, and U18 years), we were hoping that younger categories of players (U8, U10 and U12), participants of the World Chess Championships in Italy (Montesilvano, November 14-27), will be less pressed with OTB ambitions and more curious to try themselves in solving. In Brazil, the numbers of solvers per group were inversely proportional to their age, and the same tendency was shown in Italy, where each age category had more solvers than all three groups in Florianópolis together!
The 1st World Cadet Chess Solving Championship took place on 21st November, with 228 solvers, including 87 girls. →read more (show/hide)…
The same as for the Brazilian event, the problems were selected by WFCC Vice-Presidnet Dinu-Ioan Nicula who was also the director at the place. His helper, the WFCC Secretary Mohammad Alhallak, took part in several organizational activities, including presentation of the competition in the new WFCC account in the Chess-Results server. The fact that they were present in Montesilvano during two weeks, as the selected International Chess Arbiters for the World Cadet Chess Championship, made the whole solving project smoother and less expensive.
For many cadets 60 minutes were too short a time to handle six problems. In the U8 category there were five twomovers and one endgame. As presented in the Results and Problems’ Difficulty page, some twomovers were more difficult for them than the study. Even the starter among twomovers caused some upsets, most notably to Rayna Yan from USA. The girl spent only 35 minutes, and with the best time among top ten contenders she missed to become the absolute winner among boys and girls.
The U10 group of 91 solvers was the largest and the only one with a perfect result, achieved by Anand Tsogtbileg from Mongolia. The problems for U12 group were too difficult for more than a half of the participants. One of the reasons was failure to write correctly solution of the easiest #2, where both white Knights may go to square d4, and only one of them is the correct key-piece. This problem shows that either many of the U12 players have issues with chess notation, or they didn’t read the official Regulations, where exactly such a case was clearly explained. The WFCC Solving Calendar shows all details about FIDE & WFCC solving championships 2024, including results, problems, and solutions.
The WFCC Vice-President Abdulla Ali Aal Barket came to the closing ceremony in Montesilvano to mark this inaugural event with a special WFCC plaque presented to the main chess organizers Roberto Mogranzini and Nadia Ottavi.
We hope the new tradition of joint FIDE & WFCC solving events will be growing in quantity and quality from 2025 on.
Marjan Kovačević, WFCC president
(See a wider FIDE report: https://www.fide.com/news/3326)
