Velmurugan Nallusamy clinches gold in 10th FIDE World Cup in chess composition in Retro section

Bengaluru, Oct. 10: India's Velmurugan Nallusamy brought laurels to the country as he was awarded the gold medal in the 10th FIDE World Cup in Composing in the Retros section.

While Nallusamy bagged the top prize, the silver medal was awarded to Valery Semenenko of Ukraine. The bronze medal - the first honorable mention - went to Andrew Buchanan of Singapore. Meanwhile, the 2nd and 3rd commendation was given to Mikhail Khramtsevich and USA's Mark Kirtley respectively.

The 2022 edition of the tournament was held with the aim of the developing and promoting the game of chess and to expand the geography of the participants. The tournament is organised by the International Chess Federation, along with the participation of the World Federation of Chess Composition.

Director of the tournament, Aleksey Oganesyan sent in all the compositions to the judges. In each section of the tournament, the winner is awarded a prize money of 500 Euros along with a medal and a certificate.

Meanwhile composers in the second and third place are awarded medals and certificates. The prize distribution ceremony is set to be held at the closing ceremony of the World Chess Composition Congress 2022 in Fujarah (United Arab Emirates).

As per the rules of the tournament, in each section, only one composition by each author was acceptable and joint compositions were not allowed. Furthermore, in the retro section, only orthodox Proog Games (based on standard rules of chess, i.e. no fairy PGs) were accepted in the 2022 edition.

In the final awards presented by Kostas Prentos, who judged the Retros (Proofgames category), picked the Indian as the best performer. Awarding the gold medal to Nallusamy, a part of Prentos judgement stated, "Despite the fact that the core theme of the two problems is the same, I believe that H11 (Velmurugan Nallusamy) has enough differences to justify a high placement in this award.

"After all, it is almost impossible for an orthodox PG to be completely original anymore," wrote Prentos.