The 28th World Chess Solving Championship (WCSC) will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, 7th and 8th of September, while the Open Solving Tourney will be on Monday, 6th September. Both events will be conducted by Brian Stephenson (UK) with Peter Bakker (Netherlands), Neal Turner (Finland) and Ward Stoffelen (Belgium), as assistants. For the exact timetable, please check the congress programme.

By the way, Brian celebrates his 50th birthday on 25th September and he is currently running a composing tourney in two sections, to which all composers are invited to contribute. For details, refer to this topic in the Chess Problem Discussion Board maintained and sponsored by Reb Orrell.

The material in the Open will be all orthodox, that is the same types as in the WCSC itself. Brian's main aim for the Open is to ensure that it is rated and that norms are available. We also support his opinion that many solvers use the Open as a warm up to the WCSC and may well feel short changed, if the type they need practice on is not present.

Fairy chess fans should not feel disappointed though... We will organize, for the very first time this year, a Fairy Solving Show! It is scheduled for Wednesday evening, 8th of September. This is an excellent idea, proposed by Petko Petkov (Bulgaria), who will also compose all the originals to be cracked by the solvers. The twomovers will feature five well-known fairy pieces (grasshopper, nightrider, locust, pao and vao) and they will have no more than 15 pieces, as usual. We will not use any other fairy conditions or board setups. We wish to express our appreciation to Georgy Evseev (Russia), who upgraded his Solving Show software that he used in the Moscow congress last year, to now accept fairy pieces, too. The participants will not be strictly selected among the solvers with top performance in the WCSC, so that all fairy chess fans could have the chance to try their skill.

The usual Solving Show will be held on Thursday, 9th of September, in parallel with the Prize Giving ceremony for the composing tourneys. Harry Fougiaxis and Yiannis Garoufalidis will select the problems and run the event.

Last, but not the least, we remind you that L'ubomír Širáň (Slovakia) presents all news about domestic and international chess solving events in his excellent Solving Chess site, where he also keeps record of the official rating list. Don't forget to check the rules, the world champions and titles list, the WCSC 1990-2003 comparison tables and the valuable archive dating back to 2000.