The Pro Chess League is the world’s first online chess league. It is just like an ‘IPL’ for chess. There will be teams from different countries around the globe. It will be a two month league starting from January 11th 2017 until 26th March 2017. Each team has to have four players for each match and the average rating of the team must be at least 2500 ELO. Teams can also pick free agents for their matches.
The league has stalwarts like Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, and Hikaru Nakamura in the fray. They will be competing for the league title, which offers a huge prize fund and other exciting prizes. Each team is based on the name of the city followed by a nickname.
The Indian team is called Delhi Dynamite. It has strong grandmasters like Abhijeet Gupta, Tejas Bakre, Sahaj Grover, Lalith Babu, and Tania Sachdev in the team line-up.
International Master Vishal Sareen is the head coach and manager of the team.
The league is going to be one of a kind and will be a huge boost for international chess. It has a short format which will be viewer friendly. As matches will be played online, people can watch the games from any part of the world. There will be live coverage of the games on the site-www.chess.com- which is the main sponsor and organiser of the league.
Indian chess fans are awaiting this innovative league. All eyes are now set on 11th of January when the ultimate battle begins.