FIDE Candidates Countries Youth Online Chess Tournament to Be Held on April 18-19 on Chess.com

Russia is represented by the strongest team.

The FIDE Candidates Countries Youth Online Chess Tournament is a team match for youth players under 16 years old representing China, France, Netherlands, Russia, USA, and FIDE. It will be played on Chess.com on April 18 and 19.

The event is organized by the International Chess Federation, the Board and Card Games Administrative Center of the General Administration of Sport of China, the Chinese Chess Association, and the Henan Sports Bureau. Co-organizers are the Henan Provincial Social Sports Center and Chess.com.

The Russian team is represented by IMs Volodar Murzin (2465), Stefan Pogosyan (2442), Rudik Makarian (2442), WGM Leya Garifullina (2357), and Alisa Nur-Mukhametova (2262). The team's coach is GM Mikhail Kobalia. 

Mikhail Kobalia: "We have formed the strongest team, which includes the European and world champions, some of them are the reigning titleholders. Only for the second girls' board, there were several equally weighted candidates, but we decided to opt for Alisa Nur-Mukhametova's result at the previous European youth championship. 
 
Naturally, our main goal is to fight for the first place. Initially, we'd been favourites together with Teams China and USA. However, after FIDE team had been included, they became clear favourites. But we will do our best to give them a good fight, and I believe in our team. It has long been known, that the rating advantage can be compensated with a strong will and a fighting spirit, while medals won at the World and European youth championships give evidence of the fact that our team is quite all right.  
 
Of course, online tournaments cannot substitute a real play completely. Besides, the problem of cheating is even more acute online than in reality. For example, there will be reinforced anti-cheating measures during this tournament but even they cannot objectively guarantee the purity of results. But we don't have alternatives in these hard times, and we can only be happy for chess players who can efficiently prepare and participate in events even now". 

The tournament is a single round-robin consisting of five rounds with a time control of 10 minutes with a two-second increment. The first three rounds will be played on April 18; the final two rounds on April 19.

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