Women's SCC: Quarterfinals start on Monday, with Hou and Ju as top seeds

by Carlos Alberto Colodro
8/31/2024 – The final stages of the Julius Baer Women's Speed Chess Championship will take place on 2-5 September, with the quarterfinals set to start on Monday. A stellar field is participating, including Hou Yifan, the highest-rated woman player in the world, and Ju Wenjun, the reigning world champion. Alice Lee, aged 14, also made it to the quarterfinals.
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A remarkable field including Hou and Ju

Next Friday, the in-person semifinals of the Speed Chess Championship will take place in Paris, with Hans Niemann set to face Magnus Carlsen in a much anticipated confrontation. Before the main event, though, we will get to enjoy the final stages of the Juluis Baer Women's Speed Chess Championship, featuring a stellar lineup.

The online women's tournament will see the quarterfinals starting on Monday, as the tournament is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday. The players are fighting for a share of the $71,000 prize fund.

In the round-of-16, which took place last week, all but two of the rating favourites advanced to the quarterfinals. Polina Shuvalova got the better of Tan Zhongyi, a former women's world champion and the winner of the 2024 Women's Candidates Tournament, while 14-year-old Alice Lee defeated Sara Khadem.

The remaining 6 participants who reached the quarterfinals are all much respected players in the women's circuit. Most notably, Hou Yifan and Ju Wenjun are taking part. The semi-retired Hou has been the highest-rated woman player in the world for years now, while Ju is the reigning women's world champion.

The Chinese duo will be joined by Kateryna Lagno, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Alexandra Kosteniuk and Valentina Gunina.

Women's Speed Chess Championship 2024

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Knockout format

  • Sixteen players compete in a single-elimination bracket
  • All matches consist of three segments, each a countdown timer with a different time control (see Match Format below)
  • The player with the most cumulative points at the end of the last segment wins the match
  • Games that start before the countdown timer runs out count toward the final score
  • If the match ends in a tie, players contest a four-game 1+1 match
  • If still tied, a single bidding armageddon game with a base time of 5 minutes determines the winner

Matches format

All matches are divided into three segments, each a countdown timer, as described below:

Round-of-16 and quarterfinals

  • 45 minutes of 5+1 games
  • 30 minutes of 3+1 games
  • 15 minutes of 1+1 games

Semifinals and final

  • 75 minutes of 5+1 games
  • 50 minutes of 3+1 games
  • 25 minutes of 1+1 games

All games - Round of 16

In this video course, experts (Pelletier, Marin, Müller and Reeh) examine the games of Judit Polgar. Let them show you which openings Polgar chose to play, where her strength in middlegames were, or how she outplayed her opponents in the endgame.

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Carlos Colodro is a Hispanic Philologist from Bolivia. He works as a freelance translator and writer since 2012. A lot of his work is done in chess-related texts, as the game is one of his biggest interests, along with literature and music.