The 2nd FIDE Women’s Grand-Prix tournament will take place in Nanjing (China) from September 27th to October 9th, 2009.

The participants of the event are:

Zhao Xue (CHN) – rating FIDE 2544
Tatiana Kosintseva (RUS) – 2539
Nana Dzagnidze (GEO) – 2536
Marie Sebag (FRA) – 2531
Xu Yuhua (CHN) – 2485
Zhu Chen (QAT) – 2473
Lilit Mkrtchian (ARM) – 2467
Shen Yang (CHN) – 2453
Munguntuul Batkhuyag (MNG) – 2412
Baira Kovanova (RUS) – 2406
Martha Fierro (ECU) – 2394
Betul Yildiz (TUR) – 2217

Prize fund: 50,000 US dollars

The 1st FIDE Women’s Grand-Prix tournament took place from March 5 to March 20, 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey and was won by Humpy Koneru.

In 2009-2010 FIDE is planning to hold 6 Women’s Grand-Prix tournaments with 12 players participating in each of them. There will be 17 players who will participate in the Grand-Prix series. Each player who qualified for the Grand-Prix will need to choose 4 tournaments out of 6 to play. The winner of this Grand-Prix series will play a match against the women’s world chess champion in 2011. The rules of the Grand-Prix series can be found on the FIDE website, here.

Posted by: Alexandra Kosteniuk
Women’s World Chess Champion
www.chessblog.com