Chess Events Roundup
While the focus of chess fans' attention is mostly fixed on the current super-tournament in Nanjing, there are a number of other attractive events worthy of mention. The pause for a rest day in Nanjing provides an opportunity to move the spotlight briefly to other parts of the world.
European Club Cup
The European Club Cup in Plovidiv, Bulgaria (previewed here), has now finished and the 'Economist' team took the title convincingly by a clear two points. The women's competition was won by 'Cercle d'Echecs de Monte Carlo' headed by the powerful duo of Humpy Koneru and Hou Yifan.
Lev Aronian (pictured above) won the prize for the best individual performance, and pushed his live rating up over 2800 Elo for the first time!
All the games from the competition (featuring among others Aronian, Ivanchuk, Mamedyarov, Grischuk, Shirov, Gelfand, Radjabov, Kamsky etc) are available at the official website.
Cap d'Agde Rapid
The main 'Trophy' competition at Cap d'adge in France runs from 23-31 October and includes Hikaru Nakamura (pictured), Vassily Ivanchuk, Judit Polgar and Anatoly Karpov. There are two groups of 8 players, with the top four from each group going through to quarter-final matches, then semis, and the final on 31 October.
The time control is 25 minutes plus a 10 second increment. The qualifying rounds are still to be completed, and the star performer so far is Nakamura, who is dominating qualifying group A with 5 wins from 5 games! The official website can be found here (in French).
14th Unive Tournament
This Dutch tournament is better known its former name (and venue) of Hoogeveen. It is a four-player double round-robin between Alexei Shirov, Anish Giri, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and last year's winner Sergei Tiviakov. It runs from 25-30 October and the official website is here (in Dutch).
SPICE Cup 2010
The highlight of this event organised by Susan Polgar in Texas is a 6-player double round-robin tournament between Zoltan Almasi, Alexander Onischuk, Wesley So, Georg Meier, Ray Robson and Eugene Perelshteyn.
The 'B' group competition is a 10-player single round robin which includes Ben Finegold, Irina Krush and a certain Mr. Daniel Rensch! Good luck Danny! 
The SPICE Cup can be followed at Susan Polgar's blog.
