UAE-Linares Tournament will be good for Filipino chess enthusiast

Starting next year, we'll see Linares super GM tournament being shared again by two separate cities, Linares, of course being the traditional home, and in some place(s), in United Arab Emirates. The move of bringing this so called "Wimbledon" of chess to the middle east, particularly in UAE will no doubt, benefit Filipino chess enthusiast in the region. Thanks to a billionaire businessman Sulaiman Al Fahim, who also happens to be the president of UAE Chess Federation, Filipinos in the region will get a chance to see first hand how top level chess tournament with top level players are being organize and play. There are hundreds of thousands overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in this oil rich country and I will bet that there are more Filipinos playing chess in this Arab state than all active UAE chess players combine. As we know, UAE is one of the best place to play chess in Asia and proves to be on it's way of becoming the world's next chess hub, tournaments and money wise.

"We pay the expenses of the players and the prizes, I think around 2 million euros (some 2.5 million dollars) Sulaiman Al Fahim told Deutsche Presse-agentur dpa in an interview in Dubai posted in the guardian.co.uk

We saw how the dark horse Grischuk wins Linares so don't be surprise if we suddenly found every egotistic GMs in the top twenty rankings begging or fighting for a seat in one of those eight available chairs in UAE for many years to come.