Team India Raises Over $6,000 For PM-Cares Fund
A bit more than $6,000 was raised for India's Prime Minister's Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund to fight COVID-19 in a Chess.com on Saturday with GM Viswanathan Anand and other top Indian grandmasters.
The simul took place on Saturday, April 11 on the Chess.com live server and was broadcast live on Twitch. Six GMs all played a simul roughly at the same time; besides Anand they were GMs Pentala Harikrishna, Vidit Gujrathi, Baskaran Adhiban, Humpy Koneru, and Harika Dronavalli. Commentators were GM Abhijeet Gupta, NM Sam Copeland and IM Rakesh Kulkarni.
Here's the full show for replay:
To participate in the simul, players had to have a Chess.com blitz or FIDE standard rating of under 2000 and were required to make a donation of $150 during the registration process in order to play the former world champion.
With over one hundred games running concurrently across all simuls, a time control of 45 minutes with a 45-second increment was used across all games.
The best scoring player was Adhiban, who lived up to his nickname "The Beast" and scored a perfect 18/18. The other scores were 19.5/21 for Anand, 18.5/20 for Harikrishna, 17.5/19 for Vidit, 17/18 for Humpy, and 15/19 for Harika.
Asked about his "chess diet" GM @adhibanchess revealed that both he and @suryachess64 were doing more #PuzzleRush than opening prep when they both got a gold medal at the 2019 World Teams! 🧩👍https://t.co/LvjI6oKLsXhttps://t.co/IOXLFCyCeC pic.twitter.com/PqV5Qp8jmD
— Chess.com (@chesscom) April 11, 2020
More importantly, $6028.89 by Twitch donations and some more via other platforms was raised for the PM-Cares fund in India.
"I'm obviously very grateful to all the participants who took part today and I hope they enjoyed it," said Anand, the instigator behind the event. "Of course, we are raising money but this was also meant to be a fun day where they get a chance to play a strong grandmaster. I hope they enjoyed it."
All of Anand's games from the simul
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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