The Magnus Carlsen Invitational, the Fourth event of the Champions Chess Tour, will be held on March 13-21. The World Champion has teamed up with Breakthrough Initiatives to commemorate the 60th anniversary of man’s first flight to outer space. The organisation that is driven by a quest for investigating the fundamentals of life beyond Earth is funded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, headed by philanthropists and tech investors Yuri and Julia Milner.
The event celebrates the 60th year of man’s first journey to space on the 12th of April 1961, when the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of the earth.
Bringing chess to wider arenas
The Magnus Carlsen Invitational tournament was formed one year back to leverage the e-platform for professional chess and went on to create history online. The event, later renamed the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, is today one of the most sought-after e-sport events online.
For its fourth leg of the ‘20-’21 tour, Champions Chess Tour has partnered with Breakthrough Initiative and the Breakthrough Junior Challenge that recognizes young talents in the field of science. The Challenge is a global talent hunt primarily for high school students to explore their ability to explain scientific theories through short videos. The non-profit organisation has been engaging a prize fund of $3 million towards significant contributions to Fundamental physics, Mathematics and Life Sciences.
To put it in the champion’s own words, the partnership with Breakthrough is a validation of the popularity and appeal of the game that is spurring interest in the tech industry. Having known the Milner couple for years, Carlsen stated that he has been involved with the Breakthrough Initiatives from the beginning and was fascinated by their exploratory adventures concerning the universe.
Carlsen hopes that the partnership would create a platform for the world’s best chess players to come together and stir up a better awareness of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge. The partnership is expected to bring in a larger audience and a better spotlight onto chess.
According to Breakthrough Initiative’s Yuri Milner, Magnus with his prodigious status and inimitable accomplishments will serve to inspire not only chess players but millions of young people who have an innate curiosity for deeper truths of the universe.
Carlsen had co-signed an open letter from Breakthrough’s space initiatives, urging an investigation of intelligence in space. Drawing parallels between chess and space, Magnus comments that chess, like space, is infinite, with ample potential moves than the number of atoms in the universe.
Moves beyond spaces
The association between the game-dom of chess, technology and space exploration is no breaking news.
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The three have a shared history for decades, with interesting tales of chess games between the Earth and space. It was in 1970, that a game of chess between the Earth and space was held. Cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov from The Soyuz 9 played against those from the ground-based office - Nikolai Kamanin and Viktor Gorbakto. The game was held when the crew took rest for a day. The duration of the game was six hours or 4 orbits of Earth. The moves were communicated via radio when the shuttle passed above Moscow.
In the fall of 2008, Dr. Greg (Taz) Chamitoff, the American astronaut was aboard the International Space Station as the Flight Engineer and Science Officer on a 6-month mission during Expeditions 17 and 18. Taz, an ardent chess player, contacted the USCF and proposed an interesting never-before chess match. He was proposing a game of Earth vs. Space.
USCF organized the event letting the whole world participate in it. For the Earth, the chess club at Stevenson Elementary School in Bellevue, Washington, made the moves. The winners of the National K-3 Championships, the school chess club would propose the necessary moves that the public was invited to vote on. The game was slow-paced with one move per day and required a lot of planning.
Recently in 2020, Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin and cosmonauts, Ivan Vagner and Anatoly Ivanishin from Russia came together in a game of chess. Karjakin was seated at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, while Vagner and Ivanishin were on the ISS 400 km away. The entire game was streamed by the Russian chess federation.
Winding Up
At the Magnus Carlsen Invitational, the champion will confront his archrival Anish Giri, the Tata Steel Chess master winner Jorden van Foreest, Rapid No.2 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and Iran’s prodigy Alireza Firouzja in a row on Saturday. The preliminary stage is an all-play-all tournament and has five rounds through Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
The Meltwater Champions Chess Tour consists of a series of 10 events within a period of 10 months and for a prize amount of 1.5 million. Between November 2020 and September 2021, the tournament will have a series of three Majors, six Regulars and the Finals. Stay with MindMentorzz to hear more from the chess world. For enquiries on chess coaching for kids in Bengaluru call us at 9606847428.