06.08.2004 JOEL LAUTIER'S PRESS STATEMENT IN DORTMUND, 31st JULY 2004

Dear Chess Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen,

The aim of today's press conference is to announce and present before you a new concept for tournament chess - the ACP Tour. If successfully implemented, the ACP is convinced this new enterprise will change the face of professional chess for years to come.

Until now, a major defect in the organization of today's top-level chess has been the lack of an integrated system of tournaments, as it exists in all major individual sports. Whether it be tennis, golf or Formula 1 racing, a clear set of rules, uniting all important competitions in the course of a year, forms the backbone of the sporting season. This has made these sports more interesting to follow for a larger audience, and ultimately, commercially successful. In order to promote chess on a greater scale, the creation of an ACP Tour has therefore become a top priority for us.

I will expose a summary of the rules and mention only the most significant parts. The full text of the rules will be distributed to all journalists present and put up on the ACP website (www.chess-players.org) in the very next days.

The ACP Tour is a tournament circuit which regroups strong international individual events during a one-year chess season. This means that tournaments held according to different formats, either round-robins, swiss systems or knock-out events, will all be included, as long as their average strength is higher than an elo rating of 2575. Determining an average rating for round-robins is easy enough, but how precisely this is done for larger events such as swiss systems or knock-out tournaments is described in the regulations.

Events played at both classical and rapid time-controls are counted, albeit with an inferior coefficient for rapid events compared to classical ones. All the above implies that blitz tournaments, team competitions, national championships and insufficiently strong individual tournaments will not be part of the ACP Tour.

Players taking part in events of the Tour gain points according to a ranking system devised by the ACP. The first ACP Tour takes place from the 1^st of July 2004 until the 30^th of June 2005. Once the season is over, a given number of best players are qualified for a final event, called the ACP Masters. The winner of the ACP Masters shall be declared the best chess player of the season according to the ACP.

A complete list of tournaments included in the ACP Tour will be published on our website and updated as the season unfolds. Likewise, updated players' standings will be published on the 15^th of every month during the whole season.

It should be noted that only ACP members are eligible for qualification in the ACP Masters event. A player has to be an ACP member for both 2004 and 2005, in order to have his results taken into account.

For those players who are not yet ACP members in 2004, they may apply for membership before the 15^th of November 2004. Past this date, the results of players who are not members will not be counted for the 1^st ACP Tour.

At the end of the season, the sum of the best five performances in ACP tournaments will be calculated for each ACP member. The eight players who have scored the highest number of ACP points are qualified for the Masters.

The ACP Masters will be held over approximately two weeks, between September and December 2005. The ACP Board will consider adding a very limited number of players to the eight qualifiers from the Tour, by granting them wild-cards. This will only be done if such a measure conditions the sponsorship of the event. However, whenever possible, the ACP Board will give preference to a tournament format comprising only the eight qualifiers from the ACP Tour.

The exact format and prize-fund are currently being discussed with interested sponsors. All relevant information will be published on our website in due time.

In a nutshell, this is the general description of how the ACP Tour will function.

As you can see, there are several advantages to having such a system uniting major chess competitions. To start with, you create a sense of unity by establishing a clear calendar of events. The impact of each local event is enhanced by the fact that it belongs to a worldwide circuit and results achieved in one tournament has an effect on the whole chess season. The stronger the tournament, the bigger the effect, hence organizers are naturally stimulated to improve their tournaments from one year to the other. More importantly, open and rapid tournaments will, for the first time, be counted alongside classical round-robins. For numerous players, the benefits of this improvement are obvious, since invitations to closed events are by nature exclusive and only a limited number of players have access to these events. Swiss systems, on the other hand, are open to all, therefore the number of candidates for qualification to the Masters increases significantly.

Another positive effect is that good results are emphasized and poor ones ignored. Contrary to the current elo rating system, where a participant is sanctioned when playing below expectations and must, as a result, be careful in his choice of tournaments, the ACP points system rewards players for their activity and ambitious play. Since one excellent result and two bad ones will still earn you more points than three average results, taking risks becomes the recommended approach. This should bring more excitement to our sport where until now, elite tournaments have sometimes produced disappointing results for the fans as the players were being too cautious.

So far, organizers around the world have responded very positively to the ACP Tour. For the single month of July, seven tournaments have already been registered and more are signing up. At the moment, the complete list of ACP events for July includes three round-robin GM tournaments - Biel (Switzerland), Taiyuan (China) and Dortmund (Germany), and four open tournaments - Paris (France), Amsterdam (Holland), Biel (Switzerland) and Pardubice (Czech Republic).

Organizers of all major events are invited to contact ACP Board Member Pavel Tregubov (gmtregubov@hotmail.com), who is in charge of the ACP Tour, if they wish to join. We are informed of most events in the calendar but it makes our task easier if organizers contact us, in order to include their tournaments in advance.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have helped with the project. Besides Pavel Tregubov, who has been the chief designer of the complete rules, mention must be made of Grandmasters Miguel Illescas and Sergey Shipov, as well as International Arbiter Eduard Dubov, who have suggested valuable ideas that were used in our system. The ACP Board would also like to thank Dr Valery Golubenko and Vladimir Bazhenov and his hard-working team for helping out with the administrative work.

In closing, I would like to give you a foretaste of how the ACP Tour results will look like at the end of the season. Using our freshly crafted ACP Points System, we have computed the results of the top 12 international events for the first half of the year 2004. Based on these calculations, eight players would have qualified for the Masters, in the following order: Vishy Anand, Sergey Rublevsky, Vladimir Kramnik, Peter Leko, Shakhryar Mamedyarov, Gary Kasparov, Alexander Grischuk and Nigel Short. The sample of tournaments used here is not large enough, nonetheless, one can see some interesting trends: the top four rated players during this period (Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik and Leko) made it to the final, together with three players who mainly obtained their qualification through strong performances in open tournaments (Rublevsky, Mamedyarov and Short). This is precisely what the ACP Tour aims to achieve: to give a fair chance to players who perform well, regardless of their invitations to elite tournaments.

Thank you for your attention.