R Vaishali will be the sole Indian participating in the women’s Grand Prix’s first leg which will be held in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The 23-year-old became the 84th Grand Master from India in May 2024 and last played in the Norway Chess where she finished fourth.
Vaishali’s next stop would be Tbilisi where she will play against some of the bests in the world.
The first leg of the Grand Prix is planned to be a ten-player round-robin tournament and will include former world champions Alexandra Kosteniuk and Mariya Muzychuk.
Anna Muzychuk, Mariya Muzychuk, Nana Dzagnidze, Sarasadat Khademalsharieh, Alexandra Kosteniuk, Alina Kashlinskaya, Lela Javakhishvili, Bibisara Assaubayeva, Stavroula Tsolakidou are the other contenders in the tournament.
The nine-game round-robin event will start on August 14 and end on August 25 at the magnificent Biltmore Tbilisi Hotel, Georgia’s first glass tower and the highest hotel in the Caucasus.
The time limit will be 90 minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 30 minutes for the remainder of the game, with an increment of 30 seconds for every move beginning with move one.
“We are looking forward to the first tournament in the new season of the Women’s Grand Prix. We think that Georgia is a wonderful starting point given the impact Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze – two former women’s world champions who are Georgian natives – had on the chess world,” said Deputy Chair of the FIDE Management BoardDana Reizniece-Ozola.
“As we will have more tournaments and more players in the 2024-2025 season, this means more opportunities to increase the visibility of Women’s Chess and help get more women interested in the sport,” Reizniece-Ozola added.
The Women’s Grand Prix series began in 2009 and has since developed into one of the most well-known and prominent events in women’s chess.
FIDE has changed the format of the system for this season, allowing for 20 players instead of the previous 16 and adding six tournaments to the schedule in addition to an increase in the total prize money.
GM Koneru Humpy and GM Harika Dronavalli are also part of the 20-player roster and will play in the later legs of the Grand Prix.
Also, Iranian WGM Sarasadat Khademalsharieh replaced the reigning Women’s World Champion GM Ju Wenjun, who decided not to participate in the Grand Prix.