Bustling Toronto & the FIDE Candidates Tournament
Day 1 in Toronto
I love living in L.A. but leaving is never hard; whenever it’s time to board the flight, we are always going somewhere exciting. As soon as we arrived at LAX, at gate 64A, I knew that serendipity had struck with that very chess number. There are 64 squares on a chess board and this important number began our journey to the 2024 FIDE Candidates tournament in Toronto, Canada. My director / spouse, Gloria Iseli and myself, Coach Q, the cheerleader for all things chess, are about to show our biggest accomplishment in film thus far, our documentary, King Chess.
When we first made King Chess (the original title was Berlin 2018), I had this dream that we would show it at future Candidates Tournaments. If you don’t know, the Candidates Tournament is the final stop in the cycle to seed a challenger to the World Chess Championship. That dream has finally come to fruition six years later. We are going to show our documentary on Friday 4/12/2024 at the Legends of Chess fundraising event. King Chess will kick off the event and a Q & A will follow with two major chess legends, former World Champion Viswanathan (Vishi) Anand and Former Women’s World Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk.
I have met Anand before at a Metropolitan Chess camp in Los Angeles and I consider him one of the nicest chess players on the planet. He has since made a detour into chess politics and is the Deputy FIDE President (basically the vice president of worldwide chess). I have never met Kosteniuk but her reputation for breaking glass ceilings as the Queen of Chess and for her incredibly strong playing strength, proceed her. She has won the Women’s World Cup and Women’s World Championship. I look forward to meeting them and asking them a few fun questions on camera.
I wrote the above last night and today is now Thursday 4/11/2024. Before we show King Chess, I will head to the Candidates Tournament and do a little reporting. I’m always looking for a way to make my schedule hectic (partially a joke) but I took on an article for American Chess Magazine. Despite an ugly editorial early this year that unfairly skewered the incredibly courageous Jennifer Shahade, I still consider them the preeminent chess magazine. It is important to counter the negativity that we see toward women in chess with positivity and a gender balance that is not easy to achieve in this unbalanced sport. Easy for me to say but I will always try to make chess more open and inclusive. With that said, the editor Josip Asik tasked me to report on the event “with eyes wide open at the hottest event”... so here I am knocking the rust off and ready to capture all of the excitement:
Last night, Gloria and I went to get happy hour at “Death and Taxes” which guaranteed to energize us. The fashionable people of Toronto were out in their high heels, leathers and fashionable outfits. There is a buzz in this city, in this place, that I felt before at the 2016 World Championship where my chess journalism began. I am incredibly excited that eight years later, I am here in Toronto with eight games to watch. Today, Candidates and Women’s Candidates will be side by side. Stand by for all of the action…