Artem Bogdanov, a student of the Chess Academy in Almaty headed by Zhansaya Abdumalik, won the Intercontinental Chesskid Tournament 'Candidates 2022', which was held from June 21-23, 2022 in Madrid, Spain.
The website Chesskid is an online resource for kids of all ages to learn how to play chess and compete with others no matter where they are in the world. They organize tournaments like the Intercontinental Tournament which took place alongside FIDE Candidates Tournament, an eight-player qualifier that determines the challenger for the World Chess Championship 2023.
The format of the tournament was a round-robin system, where each contestant meets every other participant in the competition at least once. The player with the overall best performance wins. The tournament had eight players, who qualified from online qualifiers on Chesskid.com, with participants from 52 countries and more than 200 children aged under 12.
Artem passed the online qualification and won the final offline tournament with 6.5 points out of 7 possible.
"Artem showed very confident play, impressing the organizers of the tournament, and gained some motivation from his chess idols!" the Chess Academy wrote on their Instagram post.