European chess championship prize fund set at €200 thous.

PanARMENIAN.Net - The prize fund of the next European championship will total euro 200 thous, president of European Chess Union Silvio Danailov said.

2014 championship will be held in Yerevan.

“I mean to push all the federations to have a prize fund of euro150 thousand for men and 75 thousand for women in the future and to skip the Sofia rules, as well as all our rules which were adopted at the General Assembly in Porto Carras. I think this was, of course, a bad decision. I am very happy that the decision of our Board was to recommend the General Assembly that ECU will not change its own regulations and it’s also not possible to push the prize fund, because of, you know, the big crisis of Europe. Let’s say we have a prize fund of euro 200,000 for men in the next year in Yerevan, Armenia, so we did our best. But we can’t be pushed, because if we put euro 50 thousand prize fund as minimum, nobody will bid for our competitions. So this was for one part of the meeting. The board has decided, absolutely unanimously, to recommend the General Assembly that we should respect our own rules, our own regulations, our own decisions, provide our own championships, and if FIDE decides not to count with our championships, it can organize its own tournaments, whatever they want, this is their decision,” chess-news.ru quoted Danailov as saying.