ICCF: Exciting New ICCF & TCEC Collaboration

This message is being sent to all ICCF players to announce an exciting new collaboration between ICCF and TCEC.

We're launching a trial tournament that introduces a fresh and dynamic way to play in ICCF, inspired by an idea discussed online and proposed by Tansel Turgut (Turkey) and Gareth Yeo (Wales). Gareth took the initiative to reach out to TCEC management, and thanks to their support, we now have custom opening books prepared for this event.

The aim of this trial is to make games more engaging and diverse by starting from imbalanced positions—following TCEC's successful format. These positions are designed to challenge players to convert better positions into wins and defend effectively from worse ones.

ICCF has agreed to run this as an unrated trial tournament. Based on its success, we'll evaluate whether to expand this format more broadly. Our hope is that this style could eventually be used for title norms, while still preserving the traditional correspondence chess format for those who prefer it.

You will be able to follow the games here:

https://www.iccf.com/event?id=110926

(with a five move delay).

Enjoy!

Jason Bokar - ICCF Marketing Director.