Women's World Chess Championship

The 2010 Women's World Chess Championship will take place in Hatay, Turkey from 3-24 December.

Alexandra Kosteniuk will be defending the title she earned two years ago in Nalchik, Russia.

The format is once again a 64-player, 6 round KO event, with Kosteniuk top seeded as the defending champion, and the rest seeded by Elo rating to create the draw:

So no special privileges for the defending champion (except the marginal advantage of being top seeded).

All matches will consist of two games at standard time controls (40 moves in 90 minutes, then 30 minutes to finish with a 30 second increment from the start) except the final which is contested over four games. 

Tie-breaks take the form of two rapid games (25 minutes plus a 10 second increment), then if the scores are still level there will be two blitz games (10 minutes plus 2 second increment). Finally, if necessary, there will be a sudden death game where white has 6 minutes and must win against black who has 5 minutes [EDIT: The official site has now changed the rules for the sudden-death games, so that white has five minutes and black has four, and there is an increment of 3 seconds/move from move 61].

The action starts each day at 15:00 local time (13:00 GMT).

The full schedule:

The total prize fund is 450,000 USD split as follows.

1st round 32 losers x 3,750 = 120,000
2nd round 16 losers x 5,500 = 88,000
3rd round 8 losers x 8,000 = 64,000
4th round 4 losers x 12,000 = 48,000
5th round 2 losers x 20,000 = 40,000
6th round 1 loser x 30,000 = 30,000
Women's World Champion = 60,000

Good luck to all the competitors!