The 29th World Chess Solving Championship (WCSC) will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday, 6th and 7th of September, while the Open Solving Tourney will be on Monday, 5th September. Both events will be conducted by Peter Bakker (Netherlands) with Christopher Jones (UK), Axel Steinbrink (Germany) and Ward Stoffelen (Belgium), as assistants. The problems have been selected by Brian Stephenson (UK), who is unfortunately not able to attend due to personal reasons. For the exact timetable, please check the congress programme.

By the way, Brian has in his site full details regarding the Winton Capital British Chess Solving Championship and a lot of interesting material about chess problems in general. His introductory article in the BCPS site is highly recommended, especially for beginners who make their first steps in solving and composing!

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.

For the first time in a WCCC, as far as we can recall, we will organise a Quick (Solving) Show on Tuesday evening, 6th of September, open to all congress participants. Thirty twomovers are displayed, one minute per each problem. The solvers write down only the key, a correct answer gets +1 point, an incorrect key means -1 point and, of course, 0 points if no answer is given. This particular type of Solving Show was introduced by Ivan Jarolín in 2001 and it is quite popular mainly in Slovakia.

Fairy chess fans should not feel disappointed though... After the very successful first Fairy Solving Show in Halkidiki last year, we will repeat the event this year too. It is scheduled for Wednesday evening, 7th of September. Petko Petkov (Bulgaria) will compose all the originals to be tackled by the solvers. The twomovers will feature five well-known fairy pieces (grasshopper, nightrider, locust, chinese 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, once more, our appreciation to Georgy Evseev (Russia), who upgraded his Solving Show software 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 traditional Solving Show will be held on Thursday, 8th of September, and Harry Fougiaxis 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.