The FIDE Candidates Tournament 2024 will take place in Toronto, Canada! It shouldn’t be a piece of big news, as the venue for the Candidates Tournament 2024 was announced in March last year. However, the players’ visa issues threatened the location of the event and the possibility to move the tournament to Spain was open till today.
FIDE and the Local Organizing Committee faced serious trouble with the playersโ visa issue, as 11 players hadnโt received their visas last week. FIDE sent an urgent visa appeal to the Canadian Government, setting Friday (8th of March) as the deadline to resolve the problem. FIDE officials explained that FIDE might go for a plan B and move the event to Spain if any player has an unsolved status after the mentioned deadline.
Luckily for everyone, the relocation of the tournament probably won’t need to happen. As FIDE announced today through the official Twitter account, all players and key members of the organizing team have received their visa approvals. “This is a good sign and we hope that everyone involved will get their visas in time to travel to Toronto!“, reads the announcement which can be found below.
The tournament is an eight-player, double round-robin tournament, with 14 rounds where each player is facing the others twice: once with the black pieces and once with the white pieces.