2025 World Corporate Chess Championship

Last month I had a chance to play in a tournament that is certainly going to be one of the most memorable events of the year for me - the 2025 FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship. Together with my colleagues from Microsoft we managed to qualify through the online competition and were invited to the finals that took place in Goa, India, in parallel with the World Cup. 

This is not the first time that I've been playing in a corporate chess events. Last year I organized Microsoft team that played in the European Corporate Chess Championship. We did well, especially given the level of competition. The rules of the European championship allowed each team to recruit up to two players not associated with the company, so the tournament featured a lot of grandmasters, with the likes of MVL, Kamsky and Fressinet battling it out on the top boards. We decided to go with the employees only, so we could not hope for the prizes, but we certainly enjoyed playing there.

And that brings us to the World Corporate Championships, which are organized by FIDE. The first event of this kind took place online during the pandemic, in 2021. If I recall, we played in the qualifiers but unsuccessfully. Last year FIDE already organized an in-person final in New York. Our team went a little further in the qualifications, but we were knocked out in the playoffs by Deloitte.

This year we assembled a stronger team. In the World Corporate Championship all players on the team must be full-time employees of the company. Fortunately, we discovered that among 200,000+ Microsoft employees there is at least one grandmaster, Rune Djurhuus from Norway. As a result, we went into the online qualification with a lineup that featured 1 GM and 3 players of ~2200 strength - FM Evgenii Fedorov, FM Andrey Terekhov and Filippos Stamos. The most difficult thing at this point was to find the time when all four of us could play. We ended up playing in the last qualification tournament, Group 4, and somehow managed to win it!

It was not easy, as the level of competition was quite high, with GMs and IMs on several teams. I will show just one fragment from this tournament that was played on the top board:

I did quite well at this stage, scoring 6.5/7 on the 3rd board. However, the tournament victory did not matter too much. There weren't as many teams as the organizers probably have hoped (to the point that one of the qualifiers was cancelled outright), so everyone was allowed into the knockout stage.  

I should mention an incident that happened at this stage. The brackets were published in advance, so we thought we knew who we were supposed to face in the first round and in the finals, if we make it there. However, a day before the knockouts began, we found out that one of the team in our brackets was changed. Later, I found out that the account of one of the players in the online qualifiers has been closed and all his results annulled, which resulted in the retroactive changes in the standings of our qualification tournament. However, the team that featured the offender was not banned from the competition and allowed to continue in the knockouts with a different lineup

Fortunately, during the knockout stage all players were asked to set up two cameras in their rooms and share their screens. Setting it all up was a drag, but at least it alleviated the potential cheating concerns.

As fate would have it, in the first round of the knockouts we had to face another Microsoft team.  The rules called for two matches, with colors reversed between the rounds, but the difference in ratings was too big and both matches ended with 4-0 score.

That led to the grand finale of our qualification, a match with a strong team from KPMG. That proved to be a nerve-wrecking experience. In the first match I managed to win a nice game:

However, the match ended in a tie, 2-2.

In the return match the evaluation in my game was jumping back and forth, and in the final position I was actually losing but my opponent allowed a 3-fold repetition in the time trouble. Turned out that this match also ended in 2-2 score!

According to the regulations, to break the tie, one of the boards from the match would be selected at random and then the fate of the match would be decided in an Armageddon blitz game. I must say that we got lucky, as the "wheel of fortune" pointed to the 4th board, where Filippos Stamos scored a perfect 2-0 in the match to that point. However, he still had to win one more game with White...

Of course, our team was elated, but it must have been a heartbreaking moment for KPMG. I knew that the regulations of the tournament gave FIDE a right to extend "wild card" invitations to certain teams and I was hoping that KMPG, which came so close to making it, would receive one of these "wild cards" but, unfortunately, FIDE had other plans.

It must be said that most of us did not really expect to qualify to the finals - after all, we have already tried and failed before - and the realization that we have to start planning our trips to India made us pause. We started researching the visas, the flights and the tournament schedule. It quickly became obvious that it would be quite an arduous task for everyone involved. The travel to Goa would take 20+ hours one-way and the competition itself would last three days in the best scenario (that is, if our team qualifies to the finals) or two days if we don't. After some reflection the only grandmaster on our team decided to bow out and so we had to look for someone to replace him. Fortunately, we had a few capable players in reserve and so Microsoft team in India featured two "new" players - Georgios Tsichlis and Adam Dzwonkowski.

Strangely enough, our team in the finals included two Russians, two Greeks and a Pole, but we were coming from 5 different countries - France, Czech Republic, Denmark, Japan and Poland. In fact, only one of us lives in the same country where he was born, while for the other four our careers at Microsoft landed us scattered all around the globe.

I will skip on the stories of how we were getting an Indian visa (that web-site could certainly use an upgrade), or the confusion about the flight and hotel cost limits (by the way, we still did not receive reimbursements for our flights - could be a nice New Year present, FIDE! )

Fast forward to our arrival in India. I have landed in Goa airport in the middle of the night and got to my hotel room around 4am, the day before our tournament was supposed to start.

I woke up at noon and went straight to lunch. It was interesting to see the restaurant packed with world-class grandmasters - that was certainly one of the main benefits of organizing the World Corporate Championship in parallel with the World Cup (at least, from my point of view - not sure that GMs would agree )

The day of my arrival coincided with the tie-breaks of Round 4 at World Cup. All participants of the World Corporate Championship were treated as VIPs at the World Cup (although I only found it out on the last day ) and that included access to the playing hall, allowing an opportunity to witness the tie-breaks in person:

I was the first from Microsoft team to arrive to India, with Evgenii and Filippos landing later that day. However, two more players landed in Goa on the night of the first game, arriving to the hotel but a few hours before the first round was about to start at 9:45am   Only one of them had to play that day (we had 5 players for 4 boards) and I don't know how George managed to keep himself awake, but he did and in fact he scored very well that day!

We have changed the order of the boards for the finals in accordance to the November rating list. As a result, I moved up to the first board vacated by Rune, Evgenii stayed on the 2nd board, Filippos was on the 3rd board, with George and Adam manning the last one. 

For some reason, FIDE chose a rather strange system for the finals. All teams were divided into two groups of 6 teams, then both groups played a double round robin tournament, with only top two teams from each group making it to the ultimate playoff - semi-final, followed by the matches for the 1st and 3rd prizes. 

In this setup, most of the teams would end up playing 10 games, but without actually meeting half of the teams that made it to the world finals. In my opinion, it was both simpler and more fair to get all 12 teams to play a round robin. That would have added only one extra round but would ensure that all teams meet each other.

More importantly, it would have prevented unequal division of teams into groups. The organizers tried to address it by sorting the teams into pairs of approximately equal rating strength during the drawing of the lots, but they made an important (and arbitrary) change in the process. There were two teams from Deloitte that made it to the finals and the organizers decided to assign them to separate groups. I can understand that intention, but as a result, Microsoft team, which was seeded 4th by rating, ended up pushed down the list to 5th and ended up in a "group of death" with two much stronger teams ahead of us - an outcome that would not have been possible if the organizers didn't meddle with the sorting. To make the matters even worse, the other group featured only 5 teams instead of 6, as one of the teams that received a "wild card" invitation from FIDE did not make it to India.

Be it as it may, on the first day we managed to keep the intrigue in our group going by defeating the nominally weaker teams, losing the match to the biggest favorite, Morgan Stanley that featured 2 GMs, and sensationally tying the match with Deloitte 1 team that had 3 IMs. I will show a crucial victory on the 2nd board:

As a whole, our team was playing great on the first day, but unfortunately I did not. I started by playing two games with Black against IMs, drawing first and losing the second. In the third round we were playing against the team from India, Tech Machindra. Maybe I was misled by their ridiculously low ratings. I should have known better than to underestimate Indian players - my opponent definitely plays well above his nominal 1500 strength

I finally won in the 4th round before losing to a GM in the 5th round, thus finishing the first day with 1.5/5. 

Fortunately, my teammates more than covered for me, especially Filippos was playing great the 3rd board - he would end getting a bronze medal for his individual performance. Check out how he demolished a strong IM from the Morgan Stanley team in the 5th round:

At the end of the first day, we were still in the running for the crucial 2nd place in our group. However, our hopes were dashed next morning in the rematch with UBS.

This match started in a most unexpected way. The previous evening GM Praggnanandhaa lost his World Cup match to Daniil Dubov on the tie-breaks, but next morning he graciously agreed to greet the participants of the World Corporate and to make the ceremonial first move on the first board in all matches. Here he is playing 1.Nf3 on my behalf

On the previous day we narrowly defeated UBS (2.5:1.5) and we seemed to be on track to repeating this score, but then disaster struck in the last game of this round:

And thus instead of winning the match 2.5-1.5, we lost it 1.5-2.5. Well, chess is hard, especially when one has to make a move in 3 seconds!

Perhaps next year FIDE might consider changing the time control of the World Corporate finals from blitz-like 10'+3" that was used this year to something closer to rapid, such as 15'+10", or at least 10'+10". That would certainly make for better chess and less drama.

With that loss we were officially out of the running for the medals, but the tournament went on. I was playing better on the second day, drawing both IMs before inflicting some revenge on my loss the previous day:

Funnily enough, both of us won the games that we should have lost objectively

In the 9th round Adam came out from reserve and won a nice game in the match against Equity Bank (Kenya):

The last round could not make a difference in the final standings, but we managed to "slam a door" by defeating the strongest team in our group - 2.5:1.5 against Morgan Stanley. I managed to outblitz GM Peter Acs in an equal endgame, Filippos held a draw in rook endgame a pawn down against a Hungarian IM (later that day Peter Leko was showing to his compatriot how White could win it! ) and on the last board George narrowly avoided getting hit by a second stalemate trick in the same tournament:

We ended up finishing 3rd in our group. Since we didn't qualify to the playoff, we spent the remaining time exploring what Goa had to offer - walking in the historical city center with its heavy Portuguese influence, visiting the 17th century fort overlooking the bay or simply enjoying the sunset on the beach.

In the meantime, the strongest teams battled it out, with team Greco (Ukraine) defeating Morgan Stanley in the grand finale. The Ukrainian team was super impressive, with GM Vladimir Onyshchuk on the first board, followed by 3 strong IMs. I watched YouTube tournament recap by one of their players, IM Valery Grinev, and learned that to get a job at this law firm one has to solve chess endgame studies! If I am not mistaken, the owner of this company is a former president of Ukrainian Chess Federation. No wonder that this team also won the European Corporate Chess Championship this year! (although there their lineup was slightly different, with GM Igor Kovalenko instead of GM Onyshchuk).

Deloitte 1 ended defeating Google in the match for the bronze medals.

As a bonus for everyone who read up this far, I am including a nice video recap of this event that was prepared by FIDE: