Cup offers 'big' prize money to local players

Musthofid, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The 2nd Hamzah Haz Cup, an annual chess open tournament, will start in June, with the cash prizes on offer drastically rising from Rp 5 million last year to Rp 45 million (around US$4,500), the organizing committee announced here on Monday.

The total prize money means that the Hamzah Cup, named after the current Vice President, will be the most lucrative chess event a local organizer has ever staged.

Last month's Pusam Open in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, provided a total of Rp 42 million in cash prizes.

"We want to put more weight financially on the tournament to attract as many participants as possible," committee chairman Endin Soefihara told a media conference at the Tanah Abang chess center, the prospective competition ground in Central Jakarta.

"We want to follow up what we have started for the sake of continuity of the event. We are committed to helping popularize chess in the country," said Endin, a House member from the United Development Party (PPP). The party is currently chaired by Hamzah Haz.

The tournament, which is scheduled to run from June 3 through June 9, will adopt a mixed format, combining both round-robin and knockout (KO) systems, with the organizer aiming to prevent match fixing.

Around 240 participants are expected to turn up. They will be split into four groups, each playing nine rounds of conventional chess.

The top two from each group will be awarded a place in the final stage, at which the competition shifts to a KO contest of rapid chess. A rapid game allows players 25 minutes of thinking time, compared with 3 hours in conventional games.

"We have never adopted this kind of competition before. We have opted for this system as hopefully it will be able to avoid the likelihood of participants fixing games," Hendry Jamal, from the Indonesian Chess Association (Percasi) said.

While it will be new to local chess players, the system has for a long time been an option in international events, the latest being the Eurotel in Prague, which concluded at the weekend.

However, that tournament, which lined up the best 32 players in the world, used a KO system first before shifting to conventional chess in the final.