BWC OPEN Qualifying Arenas start today!

Hello everyone!

Today will be the first day of qualifying arenas.  There are three arenas this weekend:

Arena 1: 7pm UTC/2pm EST Saturday, January 19 (today)

Arena 2: 4am UTC Sunday/11pm EST Saturday

Arena 3: 7pm UTC/2pm EST Sunday, January 20 (tomorrow)

Arenas 4 and 5 will take place on Saturday, January 25.  To see the full schedule for the Open section, read MidnightFox's announcement here or check the upcoming events tab here.

Please make sure you and your partner have already offered and accepted partnerships on chess.com before joining the event!

Read on for help joining the tournament and offering/accepting partnership!

You can simply click the links (Arena 1, Arena 2, Arena 3) in any of our announcements to join the tournament. Or, go to live chess (chess.com/play/online) and navigate to the "New Game" tab here:

You can then click on the "Tournaments"  button and scroll down to the tournament, joining from there.

There are multiple ways to offer and accept partnership. For all of them, please make sure you and your partner are both logged in to Live Chess!

1. This is the easiest way, using the profile.  Navigate to the "Players" tab here.

Find your partner's name by going to your friends list or the "All Players" list and typing their name.  Then click on their profile and find the partner button.

2. Using the console. Navigate to the "New Game" tab and click the console here.

Now type "/partner" followed by your partner's chess.com username, and press Enter to offer the partnership.

3. You can also use the "Create Game" feature to offer a partnership. Navigate to the "New Game" tab.

On the top drop down, find "Standard" and change it to "Bughouse".  Then type your partner's name in the "Partner" field and select their name. The "Play" button will change to say "Partner", and you can click that to offer partnership.

For all these methods, you should get a pop-up button at the bottom right hand corner of your screen indicating that you have offered a partnership. 

If the pop-up did not appear, then your partnership request did not go through.  You can try a few things to fix this issue.

1. Make sure you and your partner are both in Live Chess.  If either one of you is not online, the partnership request will not go through.

2. One or both of you should reload the page.

3. Seek a new game (can be blitz, bullet, bughouse, anything) to clear your list of outgoing challenges. (Actually playing the game is not important, you can abort immediately if you like.)  Sometimes an outgoing partnership request or game challenge interferes with your ability to send and accept bughouse partnerships.

Good luck! If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact me, MidnightFox, or another admin.