The London Chess Classic Pro-Biz Cup was staged online on the 9th of December. An innovative format that combined Zoom and Chess.com allowed the professional players, and the business people, who bid to play, to work together.

We were honoured that the 14th world champion Vladimir Kramnik agreed to play as well as the entire England open team in what was a fun event. There were three rounds played with 15 minutes on the clock and an increment of 10 seconds. Each team was allowed two 2-minute timeouts during which they muted the microphone on Zoom and called each other via telephone, or Whatsapp.

Fighting chess was the order of the day and there were only two draws from 14 games in the first 2 rounds. In round three, Vladimir Kramnik playing with Ryad Belab reached 3/3 after they defeated Matthew Sadler and Terry Chapman. It was a hard-fought battle that concluded in an instructive rook and pawn endgame.

Gawain Jones partnering Richard Jianyang also got to 3/3 after surviving some tricky moments against Luke McShane and Chris Flowers. Under the rules there was a play off between the two amateur players from the leading teams. Richard launched a violent attack from the outset and was rewarded with a blunder from Ryad who somehow managed to fight his way back into the game and take the trophy.

We would like to record our thanks to the arbiting team of Alex Holowczak, Shohreh Bayat, Matthew Carr and David Sedgwick who did an incredible job in making Zoom work and ensuring that all the games went smoothly. Thanks also to Maria Emelianova for a fantastic stream on Twitch that I was able to contribute to with live commentary on all the games.

A pgn file is here.

The pairings and results are here.

We look forward to running more events like this in the future even when the face to face Pro-Biz Cup can be staged safely.